Corel buys photo software maker Jasc

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Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain

A very sad day indeed. This reminds me of when NetManage bought ECCO. NetManage had signed a licensing deal with Microsoft to include their Win socket network technologies in every version of Windows. They then turned around and purchased ECCO, the number one competitor to OutLook. Within two years the far superior ECCO was shelved, leaving tens of thousands of ECCO users abandoned, and Outlook without any meaningful competition.

Curiously (or not so curiously), NetManage refused to sell off the ECCO code base. The product was permanently shelved for business reasons that defy shareholder logic.

In the wake of the hapless anti trust settlement, Vector bought out Microsoft's massive anti trust inspired investment in Corel for pennies on the dollar. Clearly Redmond no longer needed to prop up Corel as some kind of Potemkin village version of a competitor. Vector immediately set about the task of emasculating Corel. They even sold off critically important XML development groups such as XMetal.

The good news here is that the door is now wide open for the GiMP open source community to make a run on the Windows empire. The bad news is that something evil is once again brewing in Redmond. There is a certain modus operandi here that has Chairman Bill's fingerprints all over it. We've seen this before. Jasc Paint Shop Pro is a fine product, and filled a much needed niche luckily outside the Redmond radar screen of profit potential. The SVG based WebDraw effort was really interesting, but was perhaps shelved when the acquisition talks first began. My suspicion is that the low end of the graphics marketplace is being cleared for Microsoft to make their long anticipated run at Adobe, but only time will tell.

Maybe the disenfranchised Jasc and ECCO user base should get together and form a computational consumers union? Get in that long line of class action ready legal combatants trying to defend their computational investments from the illegal and reprehensible collusion activities of market splitting corporate cross investing consortia.

~ge~

Posted by: garyedwards@...   Posted on: 10/15/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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