The comment from the CEO that he was pleased with last quarter's performance is frightening, but there are other concerns. The main concern is the extremely high rate of software failures. The reasons for this are many, and generally unrecognized by the very people on the verge of failure. Oracle has an endless supply of money, but the seemingly endless supply of time that went along with that when they started developing a set of application development tools was a total failure, and it's effectively dead. There is every chance that Corel's Java office suite is poorly designed, brittle, costly to maintain, slow, and far behind the latest developments in Javat. There is also a chance that the product is well designed, well implemented, robust and easily maintained, but the odds are against that.
Another concern is their total and complete lack of product focus. The man in charge was pleased with last quarter's results, he most likely enjoys dabbling in hardware and software of all kinds, using somebody else's nickel. Unless and until they get rid of the glib and unfocused leader, I don't like the odds of Corel competing with the stiff competition which is likely to accompany the success of NCs. |
