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Technology Stocks : Corel Corp. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wizzer who wrote (5039)	4/6/1998 3:30:00 AM
From: Kashish King	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 9798

Corel had a tremendous run last week but failed to break through the resistance at 2 3/4 as expected. There was a lot of press last week including the near give-away office-pack deal with the province of Ontario for use in schools. I think we'll be seeing a substantial pullback tomorrow and into the week as profit taking and reality converge on the stock. Jesse don't much like Corel and this is going to appear in tomorrow's PC Week -- everybody who's anybody reads it. Jesse Berst When my column ran in PC Week's business section, my job was to dissect important categories and companies, then predict which ones were healthy. I still get an occasional urge to exercise my vivisection skills, and this week I'd like to peer inside the graphics market. Many companies would like to sell graphics software to business professionals like you. It's hard to get a handle on which ones make safe partners. Heck, it's hard to get a handle on the category itself. Broadly defined, it includes professional graphics (such as CorelDraw), business diagramming (such as Visio), presentation graphics (PowerPoint), image editing (Adobe Photoshop), interactive graphics (Macromedia Director), computer-aided design (AutoCAD) and more. Maybe we can make sense of all this by looking at some of the leading companies: Adobe Systems. At nearly $1 billion in sales, Adobe is the kingpin by a wide margin--not through its own excellence, but because of the lack of a strong competitor. Its Photoshop image editor is a category leader, but many of its other products--PageMaker, Illustrator, Persuasion--trail the leaders in reputation, sales or both. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Corel will remain important, but it's now clear it will never leapfrog Adobe. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Adobe previously catered to the Mac market. Forbes just ran an article praising Adobe for making a "quick change" to Windows. Hello? It wasn't until 1997 that sales of Windows apps overtook Mac apps. Far from a success story, Adobe's trailing-edge transition emphasizes its navel-gazing complacency and its sluggish response to changing markets. Adobe rates as a good-but-not-great company. In the absence of a strong, sizable competitor, however, it will continue to reign. Corel. This $260 million company should have challenged Adobe, but a succession of poor acquisitions sapped the company's resources and its resolve. Corel continues to have some of the best graphics programs around, anchored by the venerable CorelDraw. But CEO Michael Cowpland has wasted millions on products such as Ventura Publisher, WordPerfect, multimedia CD-ROM titles, network computer hardware and other schemes. The last few times I've seen Cowpland, he's had lots to say about extricating his company from its disasters and dead ends, but little to say about how he plans to move his core graphics programs ahead. Corel will remain important, but it's now clear it will never leapfrog Adobe. Visio. This $100 million-per-year company is my pick as your most stable, reliable partner. It is focused clearly and exclusively on business graphics. Indeed, at many companies Visio has become the standard platform for the creation and exchange of business diagrams. With Visio firmly established there, the company is expanding into adjacent markets, such as technical drawing and low-end CAD. Visio doesn't make high-end professional graphics packages, photo editors or page-layout programs. But what it does, it does with sober, steady distinction. I'll be back to finish this topic next week, with information about other important companies, including MetaCreation (and its fatal flaw), Macromedia, Micrografx, Microsoft and upstart MGI