Yes, I think you may be right. I looked at Corel financials and they have very little cash and no steady earnings. Cash of 0.33/share and a debt:equity ratio of 1.4. I think Corel is going to have to go and get more money or sell out. The problem is guessing which one.
I'd like to see Sun buy them and drive Solaris at the high end and Linux at the low end. They are the natural Unix champion and would add a lot of prestige to Linux. I would then like to see Corel and/or Applix develop a competent office suite for Linux that was on a par with Office 95. They should then bundle it with Solaris and Linux at a price of $99. This would be the first time anyone bundled an office suite with an OS. Since Sun is giving Solaris away for personal use and Linux is already free, it's still incremental revenue, though in the "service" side, not the "licensing" side.
This would really flesh out Sun's portfolio. They would have Netscape SuiteSpot derivatives as the BackOffice, Corel/Applix as the front office, Solaris at the high end OS (multi-platform and massively parallel) and Linux as the low end OS. They would have all the advantages of the open source model, plus they would be able to offer the credibility of a Fortune 100 company for sales and support. In the critical database market, they have IBM DB2, Oracle 8i, plus Sybase and Informix, making this the best RDBMS platform. They would also be extremely strong on email (sendmail and Netscape) and intranet (Apache, Netscape Enterprise, Collabra, Application Server/LiveWire and ColdFusion on Solaris/Linux).
For corporations, the difference between a $99 Unix office suite and a $400 Microsoft-based suits (NT + Office 2000) might be compelling enough to change some minds. At a minimum, it might put pricing pressure on Microsoft. The best thing is that the backoffice type programs are much, much cheaper for client licenses than the MS BackOffice line.
Just random thought,
Matt |
