Corel is still facing a declining market share and nowhere is that more obvious than in the situation with Word Perfect. Now, you can continue to maximize your profit selling into the ever-dwindling WP upgrade and micro-not markets, or try to establish yourself as a relevant player. Cowpland is moving into NCs and in so doing he will be able to point to competitors like Sun, Oracle and IBM as the excuse for the company's own incompetence and lack of execution. Cowpland is getting into OLAP and he has the same blame options available there. Is the goal to take what little resources they still have and target markets where they have no hope of success and no idea what they are doing provided they can fix blame; or is there a more rational approach to business. It's easy to spread yourself too thin, mix in a lack of talent and little or no expertise and fail. There's no glory in telling your friends that you took on Microsoft if you never even mounted a charge. I think Saddam Hussein and Michael Cowpland would get along extremely well. They both have the same twisted sense of achievement. In fact, anybody sufficiently lacking in common sense could do what Cowpland has done.
I don't see where stating the obvious achieves anything but for those that need to have it spelled out for them let me ask: which of these goes away when you aren't selling any product because the cost isn't compelling enough to leave the market leader?
1) WP8 represents a cumulative 100+ man/years of labor. A company that makes this kind of outlay has to be able to get a decent ROI.
2) Like it or not we've got to pay Cowpland until we drum him out of there. And all of the other administrative, investor relations, advertising, secretarial, janitorial etc. staff
3) And do you think the programmers supply their own machines and tools? Or pay themselves while they write the latest versions?
Well, which? |
