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

To: Wizzer who wrote (5683)	10/12/1998 8:36:00 PM
From: Steve	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 9798

You talk if Corel is the only company that has had channel inventory problems. Have a look at what Compaq had to go through earlier this year. It easy task to prove your position with financials when position is purely historical. Channel inventory sales in equal to sales out. an operational profit of 8 million. Product development on track. New managers across the board. I don't think anyone could question Michael O'reilly's professional conservatism, questioning the numbers would be ridiculous. Having concerns about Corel management in the past would be prudent. Obviously Corel had concerns about their management or else they would have never brought on Don Sylvester, Michael O'reilly, Paul King and an entire new round of middle managment cadre. So feel free take all the historical data you want and apply it to Corel today; it is a different time and a different company. You have already seen the beginning of the turnaround with the Q3 results. To say the office suite market is a niche market is ludicrous 26 million users is hardly a niche (your statement regarding this was muddled). On demand for Corel product - your confusing stock performance with product performance. Draw has maintained its marketshare, while under Corel's ownership WordPerfect market share has gone up from 17 percent to 28 percent overall. On MC shooting his mouth off - I have discussions with the director of MS office personally. Regardless of what MC said in the press it was always MS's intention to destroy WordPerfect. They escalated the war when Corel bought WordPerfect. Micorsoft was quite content while WordPerfect was with Novell because they knew Novell was letting WordPerfect die on the vine. Microsoft knew as soon as Corel bought WordPerfect they had a problem, MS didn't need MC to say anything, the war was on. Louder than anything MC could say in the press was the fact that In July and August of 1997 WordPerfect outsold MS office taking 56 and 58 percent respectively, of US retail sales in North America, compared to MS office at 43 and 42 percent of those two months. On channel stuffing - that was a by product of the purchase of WordPerfect, there was much more inventory in the channel at the time of purchase than expected. It was also a by product of the software market at the time. I am sure Corel made some mistakes, but as soon as the problem came to the surface the company leaped into to action to remedy it. What else can you ask of a company. To MC's defense, he probably was the one to institute the changes so quickly, changes at that level could only come from one person. So tell me, your at the helm of Corel with a maturing product, growth is slowing, what do you do?