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

To: Steve who wrote (5498)	8/21/1998 12:40:00 AM
From: Kashish King	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9798

Nobody is going to make a plugged nickel developing core technologies, or core applications for that matter. There's Microsoft's proprietary platform and Java on Windows, white, wheat or whatever. In terms of the desktop, IBM and Sun are the only real threat to Microsoft's desktop dominance. If IBM and Sun win then Apple, Oracle everybody else in the ABM camp wins. IBM and Sun will give away the OS (Solaris if now free, JavaOS will follow) as well as core office productivity applications such as eSuite which will scale up and improve as Java improves. What customers will pay cash money for is hardware and a fully-functional workplace environment with periodic updates. Developers will leverage services like spell checking and other essential functionality which Microsoft conveniently leaves out to stifle competition with its own applications. Now there's a product for Corel: a free spelling checker and thesaurus API for Windows. If Cowpland had any vision he would see what a great opportunity that was to reach out to Windows developers. You know who else is blind? Netscape's Barksdale. Had he realized the value of eyeballs and marketshare early on they would have given the browser away AOL-style and locked in the market. They would probably be in Microsoft's shoes right now had they done that. Look at Visio, it stinks. The problem with Corel is they would tackle something like Visio and promptly fail. There's something wrong with their development process; they can't execute and it's the process which is at fault. I'm sure of that. PREDICTION: IBM buys Sun and teams up to provide a stable, enterprise platform based on Java and CORBA with full support for legacy Windows applications. Moreover, they give eSuite 99% of the functionality the average user will ever need leaving the door open for vertical market add-ons in the form of Java Beans. Oracle and Apple throw their support behind JavaOS and the rest of the industry follows. All of this hinges on IT managers being smart enough to reject proprietary APIs, protocols and languages designed for and by Microsoft to lock out competition for the foreseeable future.