I was always surprised their model of selling their older versions at a reduced rate (e.g. latest version $199, next older $100, one before that $49) never took off.
They always seemed so scrappy back in the 90s with their giant boxes and included libraries of clip art.
One of the more novelty twitter accounts I found recently posts images from one of their 10,000 item collections: https://twitter.com/clipart1994bot
The company I currently work for does something similar. Latest version costs money, previous version gets given away with hardware, and version before that is free.
However, we are going to transition to latest version costs money and two feature set reduced versions gets given with hardware and free.
Having 3 versions to support is too much overhead for a small company. And giving away old versions of our products with issues that we know we've solved gives a bad image of our software to new users we are trying to up-sell to the latest version.
From a business perspective, the older versions are used by older or larger companies that couldn't or didn't want to upgrade, they have money to shell out and should be charged more.
We don't have many corporate customers, mainly sell to individuals.
The idea is to grow the user base as large as possible and then sell them the latest version or other products.
Give away a version with 3rd party hardware is to grow the user base to new markets. Let somebody else handle the marketing / distribution and get their users. Sure lots people throw away the CD of bundled software when they buy something, but a decent number still install it.
Give away free is same idea. People love free stuff and will download it. Then hopefully they enjoy it and upgrade to get more features.
I think these images were made by few artists, because the style is very distinct and recognizable. I still encounter these clipart pics on signs of crappy cafes and shops. Made of plotter-cut adhesive film, these pics look gorgeous.
What do you base this on? Is it that neither has released a front-end javascript framework or an in-house container orchestration tool as open-source (that I know of)? Or is there some other hipness criterium that they failed to meet?
Nah, I'm old or at least in tech years I'm old. I've worked with projects before containerization I have been a former user of both products. I didn't imagine Corel had the capital to move out of bargain-bins.
They seem to have pulled the Corel logo down some time this year. That makes me a little sad, as it was always one of those little landmarks that reminded me I was almost home when I lived in downtown Ottawa.
Some were shocked to learn Corel was still around, whereas I'm shocked to learn Winzip is still around. Especially since Windows finally got around to adding native zip64 support in what...XP SP3 I think it was?
Yeah, but Windows built-in ZIP support still blows a number of goats, which is why I use 7zip... and the latter is the real reason I'm gobsmacked that Winzip is still around. 7zip's not as pretty but it does support every archive format I've ever used or needed.
EDIT: Even more shocking: they own both WordPerfect and Quattro Pro both of which are, apparently, still around. Absolutely stunned.
WordPerfect use to be favored my lawyers. This is a group that tends to stick to their tools. I dunno if their still using it but that's probably a pretty nice niche.
I recall reading that the reason it was (is) favored by lawyers was because WordPerfect did more accurate word counts in documents than Microsoft Word did. When lawyers submit briefs to some courts they have restrictions as to the maximum number of words contained in the document. Microsoft Word did things like count page numbers as words, thereby inflating the word count and reducing the number of actual words that could be in the document.
My dads office (attorney) uses it because they’ve used it since it was popular in the 80s. There’s not much reason to have them switch as long as WP continues to get support... it does everything they need.
I've seen WordPerfect on the shelf at a brick and mortar Fry's Electronics somewhat recently -- within the last year, I swear. I definitely did a double-take.
I installed WinZip on my PC a few years ago because it's the only archiver i'd found that let you view image thumbnails without extracting the whole ZIP, pretty cool feature.
A decade ago, one client at an old job required ZIPs be 256-bit AES WinZIP encrypted, which at the time meant WinZIP was the only option.
The employer was so cheap that they they didn't want to pay for WinZIP, so we'd wait n number of seconds before the file would zip. Then we'd wait n+1 seconds until it was an hour and a half wait.
Took the words right out of my stdin. Had I not caught your comment out of the corner of my eye, I was about to post word-for-word the same.
It worked for CA for a while, and then...it didn't? I'd have to go look up what happened to them, because they one day just weren't on my radar anymore.
They also own two competing video editing products. With very similar feature sets. One of which has forums with logins going over unencrypted connections. :/
It's been a long time since I've heard of an acquisition that was actually positive for the aquired/their users - can anyone working on any of these groups share such a story?
On the user side, Corel has been okay-ish with PaintShop Pro. I write Photoshop plugins and I still have lots of customers who are happy Paintshop Pro users, some 14 years after Corel acquired JASC.
That said, Corel added a kind of adware to PSP, where it will display promotions for upgrades to the new version of Paint Shop Pro even when you're not using the program. I really wish there was an easy way to disable it, but I'm sure their metrics show it is effective. Parallels are already doing a version of that (but only when you launch the program), and now even Apple itself is using notifications to advertise products & distribute discounts [1]. There's probably no avoiding it now.
I loved PSP under Jasc, after I think XII after the Corel buyout, I gave up on the product... Paint.Net or Gimp (painfully) give me the little utility I usually need. I really do miss PSP, but I think 9 was the last really good version, and I don't have a key or media for it anymore.
v9 was good, but I still prefer 7, the version just before JASC switched to .NET. v7 is lightning fast, and nearly 20 years later it's still the version I use first for Photoshop plugin development, because of its speed.
From memory, v9 isn't compatible with Windows 10 (the installer won't work properly), so don't feel you're missing anything.
Serif's Affinity Photo is giving PSP real competition, but Affinity is still quite buggy in some ways on Windows. I'd probably recommend Corel PSP 2018 / 2019 over Affinity for the moment. Paint.NET is great too.
I haven't really looked at anything since XII... I do mostly development, and my image work is mostly relegated to slight color shifting and/or cropping/scaling. I do wish Paint.Net were a better cross platform option... I've used Pinta, but it's been kind of buggy and isn't nearly as well flushed out.
It's a shame that so many tried to re-bundle Paint.net in sleazy ways... though the ads on their own site are horrible, and I don't fault the main dev(s). I just would love to see Pinta or anything else become as easy to use. I may try to dig up PSP7 and see if I can find a key for it.
I installed Corel Linux on the family computer when I was 13. It was my first Linux distribution. Someone from school got the disc out of a magazine if I remember correctly.
I couldn't get the modem to work and the installer didn't add a boot option for the Windows 98 partition (LILO bootloader), so my family was understandably pretty pissed off.
I ended up figuring out how to restore the Windows MBR, and eventually figured out how to dual boot.
To this day, when I mention Corel Linux was my first Linux distribution people tend to think I'm confused since "Corel makes graphics software, not Linux distributions!"
Ah getting my first modem under linux working - the autovtest was dialling 999999 - I got a call back as soon as I managed to hangup. Explained to the 999 operator I was just testing Linux....
There's nothing inherently wrong with a software modem. It's just a different way of implementing the hardware. Some software modems were effectively programmable DSPs, almost like a software defined radio for a wired connection.
I doubt they ever claimed Linux driver support so it's not their fault people weren't able to get them working.
The good old dot com days. I remember buying Corel stock at $6 and it popping to $32 in a few weeks (or was it a few months, I can't seem to find Corel listed as a public company now to check the price history) on the Linux hype, only to crash down soon after (got out at $8 :) ).
Hard to believe, but true. Wish I had a chart of the Corel stock price but from Wikipedia[1]:
"Corel Linux, also called Corel LinuxOS, was a Debian-based operating system made by Corel that began beta testing on September 21, 1999[1] and was released to the public on November 15, 1999." ... "Corel later discontinued the distribution, but did not remove the former Corel Open Source Development website until March 2002."
So at least I did not just dream it. Did you live through that era? It was very similar to the blockchain hype but lasted a bit longer.
Edit: Confirming the Linux hype:
"Red Hat's initial public offering was on August 11, 1999. A total of 6,000,000 shares were priced at $14 ($7 post-split) per share."[2]
On January 10th, 2000, four months later the price peaked at $140, which would have netted you one of the fastest 10 baggers in history. By July of 2001 it was under $4
VA Linux is often forgotten too. Due to Linux in the name, and even a sexy ticker symbol, rose a crazy 700% for those in on the initial offer price. And there were a lot of those people because they added everyone who had their names on any software included in their Linux distribution. Myself thankfully included.
Well, this outfit sounds much more impressive than the vague prospects of Corel's Linux offering:
> Geeknet, Inc. owns the online retailer ThinkGeek and is a subsidiary of GameStop. The company was formerly known as VA Research, VA Linux Systems, VA Software, and SourceForge, Inc.
> VA Research was one of the first vendors to build and sell personal computer systems installed with the Linux operating system, as an alternative to more expensive Unix workstations that were available at the time. It was the largest vendor of pre-installed Linux computers, with approximately 20% of the Linux hardware market.
> Intel and Sequoia, along with Silicon Graphics and other investors, added an additional $25 million investment in June 1999.
> In fiscal 1999, the company's sales grew to $17.7 million, up from $5.5 million in fiscal 1998. In fiscal 2000, the company's sales were $120.3 million.
I vaguely remember that the VA Linux computers were quite inexpensive but basically unusable due to software problems. Another nail in the Linux desktop coffin.
I've heard about the distro, but not a reason why it existed or why anybody would buy it. Apparently, it was marketed for desktop use, which I guess wasn't yet universally seen as ridiculous in '99.
About that time every company and its dog was trying to push in the commercial Linux distribution space, trying to get a piece of the sweet pie that Redhat was eating.
They were also bundling/selling Wordperfect Office for Linux at that time, since the only real competitor on Linux was StarOffice which later purchased by Sun and open sourced - and later because of the acquisition by Oracle, was forked into LibreOffice. Hard to believe that was all nearly 20 years ago now.
WordPerfect runs perfectly on modern Linux. For fresh Debian installs, I have a standard set of tweaks to apply, and then it's up and running. I love it because it's relatively compact, very fast, and really has all the word-processing features one needs.
Woah. Memory lane. I remember helping with a Corel Linux install fest way around that time at the University of Ottawa. It was pretty good for that time in that the installer was "friendly"...I think...this is going back many years here.
The issue was (and probably still is) that MS Word paginates footnotes improperly. They can't change it because it will break backwards compatibility. This handed the legal market to WP. And because you can't reliably import/export the documents and get pagination to work, you often have legal firms using Word to do the initial preparation and then hand it over to a legal secretary to type the whole thing into WP -- which will be the document that is submitted to the court.
I think they're asking about the assertion that "WPS Office seems to have cornered the market for MS Office alternatives", which would be pretty surprising. Libreoffice, Google Docs, and iWork all exist, and all seem more popular.
Amazing isn't it? I still prefer Corel Draw to the Inkscape or any of the Adobe products. I have their PowerDVD software on a laptop which is used as a portable DVD player for visiting nieces and nephews.
I used Corel Draw back when I worked at a T-shirt and jersey shop in college, and frequently used it to drive a vinyl cutter for jersey numbers and other decoration. From anecdotes I’ve read since then, it appears the software is still the preferred choice in custom apparel, signage, and vehicle livery shops because it interfaces well with the cutting machines those industries use.
yes, Corel Draw was the #1 choice among the sign shops I worked at. Almost every vinyl cutter or large-format digital printer supported Corel export formats really well. I spent years working with it daily - it was pretty solid, and had an amazing amount of features & flexibility.
Corel Painter has its niche among digital artists - it's still one of the higher end digital painting programs that simulates real life mediums (acrylic, oil, watercolor) remarkably well.
There's really no iPad equivalent to Corel Painter, but Corel registered the procreate.com domain to redirect to their Painter product page (Procreate (procreate.art) by the Australian company Savage is one of the strongest digital art applications on the iPad).
Corel has also recently purchased Gravit Designer, which presumably will stand as their main digital design app that competes with Sketch and Adobe XD.
I switched to Affinity and never looked back at Photoshop/Illustrator. That being said, I used them at a hobbyist level, nothing very complex, so while it was an easy transition for me, it may not be for everyone. But I've seen quite a few people state they have moved off of Adobe products over to Serif. I've been very happy with Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer.
Not only with them, but pretty much with everything related to CNC. And the reason is that it exports clean, optimized paths -- and in the DXF format. What comes out of Affinity Designer is unusable garbage.
Yeah I was just going to ask this too! Crazy. And yeah good for them. All everyone talks about is photoshop these days. So for them to still be around means they have to be doing something right.
Like Kaspersky, parallels is Russian software and on the list of "domestic" software by the Russian government. Parallels has been erasing references to its Russian roots since the hackergate began. Trying to avoid Kaspersky fate and escape sanctions and bans especially when US federal funding is involved? It is not clear who is buying what in this case.
JetBrains is registered as a Czech company but is basically Russian: most of its employees are (were?) russian, and it's two main offices are in Russia.
Looks like Corel’s PE owner Vector Capital doing another tangentially related acquisition (jasc, winzip, intervideo, and Roxio are Corel’s other acquisitions under Vector) to bolster revenues, would be surprised if there was another more nefarious angle
On what do you base that assertion? I've never heard anything about that. Their headquarters have been in Washington state for a long time as far as I know.
“From our highly complementary product portfolios to our shared business models and strategies, Corel and Parallels are a great fit. Thanks to the combined power of our technologies and teams, we see tremendous opportunities to drive continued growth and success for our businesses and most importantly, our customers.”
I just started using a Mac this year, and I need to run Linux and Windows for testing reasons. I'm starting to do more freelance work now, so I'll have some Windows-focused work as well.
Right now I have separate machines for each OS, but I'd like to just use a Mac and get rid of my other machines. I've played with Virtualbox, but I haven't used Parallels or VMWare. Does this acquisition make Parallels any more or less appealing as a virtualization solution for macOS? Does anyone have any clear recommendations for doing professional work in various OSes on a Mac at this point?
I've been using Parallels Desktop to develop & test Windows software from a Mac for the last decade. It's excellent, and I would definitely grab a perpetual copy of the current version while you can. VMware Fusion is the other contender, but consensus seems to be that Parallels is now dramatically faster than all the competition [1].
I just bought a Thinkpad and switched back to Windows, so I'm looking for VM software on the Windows side now. Hyper-V is just painfully slow compared to Parallels. If the Corel acquistion means Parallels is coming to Windows I'll be very happy, but I'd still like to know the best Windows VM software in the meantime.
I would give VMWare a test on the Windows Side, it was always the best option from my own experience in Linux and Windows. That said, I mostly don't notice too much these days and mostly use Docker for (windows|mac) for anything Linux I'm working on in development. The only issue is anything that is a "shared volume" between the host and native will be very slow as it's copying actions in/out of the VM. Staying all in vm is better.
Yep, I'm 100% GUI. I use Parallels to test how my Win32 based apps work on different versions of Windows. I'm also testing against different Photoshop plug-in compatible graphics programs, so its useful to be able to restore to a clean snapshot taken just after installing Corel Paint Shop Pro, for instance. Everything in Parallels has been running at near native speed lately.
On the Mac I was also using Parallels to test GUI apps I was writing for different versions of ElementaryOS / Ubuntu and also for different macOS versions, but I realize I'll lose the Mac compatibility with the switch back to Windows.
There's ways around the Mac client limitations, though I really wish Apple would just give us a decent power user option already. I almost wish they'd sell a "Developer Kit" which would be an apple branded mobo with an Apple bios with install media. Then you could stick any compatible intel cpu, compatible gpu, and diy it... maybe mobo + case as a barebones... even if it was $500-600 for the barebones, I and many others would still pay that much vs. hackintosh route.
Then they'd just need to release maybe 1-2 motherboards every 12-18 months. Say a full ATX and an ITX variant.
Yeah... which sucks. That said, I really don't have much need for full VMs anymore. At work it all gets deployed in Windows. I try to keep everything I make cross platform and use docker to keep the services I'm not actively working on running local for other stuff. (really appreciate MS SQL Server docker image)
If I need a full VM would probably just use Hyper-V anyway as it's "good enough" ... on my home hackintosh, I haven't needed windows much at all... I use the kid's PC for the handful of projects that must have windows when I have to touch them.
Docker really gets me pretty much all I need in terms of linux support. Even building node projects for AWS Lambda. If I did gui development (other than browser ui/ux), I would probably be a bit more involved.
Parallels is the best solution in my experience, but they do use a bunch of dark patterns. They used to sell ‘download insurance’ for example, and really push antivirus if you install windows. I doubt this acquisition will change that, though they do push their subscription package now.
I’ve been meaning to try alternatives, VMWare seem to be maintaining Fusion again.
Bootcamp is the best option in my experience.
I needed to run some very heavy Excel workbooks on my Macbook Pro a few years ago, Parallels was much slower than 64 Bit Office on Bootcamp, Mac Office was also slow, was then 32 bit and not fully file compatible.
Macbook pro Bootcamp is the best Windows PC I’ve ever had - has been rock solid for 5 years. I remember Microsoft publishing some stats that Apple macbooks were by far the most reliable Windows machines!
I had a Windows 10 license already, based on a quick search, keys seem to be easily available for less than $20.
Seconded. Parallels has some nice features, like being able to run windows apps in OSX, but it's noticeably slower than booting directly into windows. Plus parallels lets you run your bootcamp partition from OSX if you need to.
I started using it at Parallels 6 and currently using Parallels 10. The latest version is Parallels 14.
Don’t expect much from customer support. I bought parallels 10 just about 30 days before Parallels 11 came out. I talked to customer support and they simply said no to letting me instead get Parallels 11 even though the time period was so short. I understand it doesn’t say anywhere on their website about that they would honor new free versions if the old versions were purchased within a certain amount of time. But customer service is a thing and they don’t seem to care about it. All I I got was a short: sorry can’t help you. And I haven’t bought a new version since. I probably would have if they had offered me a upgrade back then. I’m still running windows 7 and I don’t need all the new bells and whistles new version of parallels offers. So it doesn’t bother me that I’m running a 4 year old version.
Like another comment mentioned, they do use dark patterns. I can’t count how many times I’ve clicked on “Don’t show again” on the new version ad they show you when yours is outdated. Yet it still pops up to this day.
I’ve never used their recommended settings. I just pick one and go back into the settings and change it to whatever I usually default to.
All that said, their interface is a lot more polished than the other software. I’ve done research on VMware fusion, and I always read comments saying that Parallels is better. I haven’t tried fusion myself.
I also love the fact that I can simply copy the parallels file if I need to mess with it and not have to worry about messing up my original install. For this purpose, I always keep a fresh copy of windows on my computer. Whenever I feel like I’ve added too much junk to my windows image, I simply delete it and make a copy of the fresh install and I’m on my way again.
I’ve never used Parallels Access so I can’t comment on that.
I started out using Parallels at first, but can't see having to continually pay to upgrade, especially when I'm mainly using Linux images although I do run a copy of Windows periodically.
What people are learning, though, is that nothing from Oracle is ever really free, it's simply deferring time evaluating licensing terms and legal costs into the future.
For example, Oracle's interpretation of "personal use" in the VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (which applies to the Extension Pack) changed completely sometime in late 2016 / early 2017, without notice. Compare [1] with [2].
Before: "Personal use is when you install the product on one or more PCs yourself and you make use of it (or even your friend, sister and grandmother). It doesn't matter whether you just use it for fun or run your multi-million euro business with it." [1]
Now: "Personal Use and/or Educational Use expressly exclude any use of the Product for commercial purposes or to operate or run a business, organization, governmental organization, or educational institution." [2]
Oracle does track downloads and will make inquiries if they suspect commercial use.
I have and use both Parallels and VMWare Fusion on a Macbook Pro. Personally I prefer VMWare because I've run into less problems managing VMs with Fusion than I have with Parallels. In my experience Parallels updates are more likely to break compatibility with old VMs. I don't really use the "Linked Clones" snapshot feature of Parallels so VMWare's Snapshots work just fine for me too. I was pretty sure Parallels use to cost much more than VMWare for a single seat but a quick check shows that they're both about $80USD at the moment.
I (used to?) own a student license for Parallels Desktop circa 2012, though it may have expired by now.
In my experience, I could see no major differences between their solution and, say, Virtualbox.
There were some Mac-specific features like working well with Exposé when in Seamless mode and a few other UI niceties, but Parallels seems primarily geared towards supporting Windows.
Linux Guest OS support of features like Seamless mode refused to work unless you had specific kernel versions and was always several versions behind in my experience.
I'm sure the feature parity gap between Virtualbox and Parallels Desktop is even smaller today than it used to be.
The pricetag is usually less for Parallels products compared to the leading commercial competitor, FWIW.
> In my experience, I could see no major differences between their solution and, say, Virtualbox.
What software were you running inside the VM? Parallels performance is good enough I can actually play a lot of games, which was amazing to me after years with Virtualbox.
TBH, even for simple stuff like Internet Explorer, I'm surprised you didn't notice a performance difference.
I’ve been using the free Parallels Desktop Lite from the application store. Well its free for Linux and Windows. It also doesn’t do bridging networks - only NAT and host networking. Considering it is an App Store product which should follow the sandboxing rules I suspect its just a fronted for the native hypervisor framework.
I just need to fire an ocasional Linux vem to test something it is more than enough to me. YMMV.
I was wondering this too, and if it might be a factor in the timing of the acquisition.
Parallels used to make Windows & Linux versions of their product [1], so there might still be ways that Corel can continue selling a product even if Apple's new hardware lineup prevents virtualization.
