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© 2003 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
The 2003 rendition of the CorelWORLD User Conference was a blend of hope and optimism, mixed with gloom and despair. This mosaic of emotion was personified to perfection by one of our regular patrons who greeted me as follows:
It’s so great to be back—I can’t wait to see everyone. Will Tony [Severenuk from Corel] be here? What the hell’s the matter with them anyhow? Are they going to get bought and split up? And what the hell’s wrong with you, calling this the last one ever? You’d better be full of sh*t.
That pretty much summed up the dynamic in San Diego this June. The patrons will be forgiven for feeling as if they were in a fog, and we’re not just referring to the aftermath of El Niño which created an entire week of overcast and clouds. The timing was perfect if you like intrigue. If you were looking for answers about the software, the conference delivered in spades, as it has since 1989. However, if you were looking for answers about the future of Corel, the software, and the user community of which CorelWORLD is a part, you left with only questions.
Conference-goers arrived knowing about the ground-shaking announcement
that Corel’s leaders were recommending the acquisition by Vector
Capital. The move would keep Corel in one piece and see its Board of Directors
replaced by a group of eight well-funded technologists from San Francisco.
Most patrons also heard our announcement that this would likely be our
last CorelWORLD. Lots of questions...
For those on the inside, the tone was set early. On Sunday, the eve of the conference, Corel’s Sylvain Charron, Product Manager for CorelDRAW, gathered four of us who have been involved with the product the longest and asked us outright: What have we at Corel done wrong and what can we do to fix it? That was the basis for a three-hour meeting.
The following morning, Charron kicked off the conference as the opening keynote speaker, and his theme did not deviate much from the closed-door meeting he chaired the night before. He was not shy about the company’s lack of marketing vision and the plight that this has created, and he did not try to sidestep these issues. Charron was on a fast-track to move up the company ranks, but chose to step away in order to enter the CorelDRAW trenches. As such, he is functioning as an internal turnaround specialist, soon to be answering to the big turnaround people at Vector.
Not an hour after his keynote, another Corel representative who has been with the company for over five years sought me out. “On behalf of everyone at Corel,” he told me, “I want to apologize. We know how much we ----ed everything up. Please don’t give up on us.”
As far as I can recall, this was the first time anyone from Corel had
ever taken this level of accountability for the damage done to the user
community and the independent solution providers (of which CorelWORLD
is one). In previous years, keynote speakers would issue bland statements
a la Ronald Reagan’s “mistakes were made.” And in private,
the earfuls we typically received were about the new initiatives
and improved programs about to be instituted. Such candor from
Corel officials, both publicly and privately, was extraordinary.
Tuesday morning’s keynote speaker was confirmed sometime Monday evening. In a series of 11th hour discussions reminiscent of two baseball teams making a late trade, one of the partners at Vector Capital flew down to San Diego to address the group.
“What if we came down and just shook a few hands and mingled quietly.”
“We want you to be our featured speaker of the day.”
“No, it’s too early in the process; we would have nothing to say.”
“What if we just did 10 or 15 minutes of Q&A.”
“We probably cannot answer their questions.”
“Okay, we tell them that and encourage them to tell you what they want instead of ask you what you think.”
“I think we can do that.”
Chris Nicholsen took the microphone Tuesday morning and went for almost an hour, not just 15 minutes, and showed a level of candor that left many of us stunned. He made it clear that his group knows more than just general high-technology. He did more than just rattle off the names of the big players; he showed command for the dynamic of the industry, the issues facing Corel, what battles could be waged and which ones should be left alone. (“When your two chief competitors are Adobe and Microsoft, a frontal assault is probably not the best course of action.”) At least a half-dozen times, he prefaced remarks with “It’s too early to talk about this, but...” and then proceeded to exhibit more frankness than a legacy of Corel leaders.
He described the process Vector takes when it invests. Vector buys all of the company’s stock and takes the company private. It typically leaves management structure in place and does not participate in day-to-day dealings. But in taking over for the Board of Directors, it would chart the general course for the company. After a period of between two and five years, it divests in the company, either with a public offering of stock or by finding a new group of investors.
When he announced that upper management would probably not be affected, there was a palpable mix of reactions. Half the group was relieved to be able to infer from this that Vector was not going to disrupt the company, make radical changes, perhaps sell off the company in chunks and dissolve it. The other half was dismayed at the notion that those people who brought Corel to the precipice of ruin would be allowed to continue.
More questions...
On Wednesday, it was my turn for the hot seat. In response to a litany of private queries about my decision to let the sun set on CorelWORLD, I said that morning that if anyone wanted to talk about the future of the conference, they should return from lunch a bit early and meet me here.
Just about everyone showed up.
In the spirit of candor that Sylvain Charron and Chris Nicholsen set the two days previous, I owed the group more than the milktoast explanation I offered in the conference guide: “Fourteen years just seems like enough...even of a good thing.”
That wasn’t really it, although the real reason was hardly more complicated. Corel’s user community is not as strong as it used to be, and in our estimation, it is no longer strong enough to support an event as ambitious as CorelWORLD. While as recently as the late 1990s and 2000, we were attracting close to 300 participants, the last three years have seen us under 200, and this year below 150.
“You have come to expect a high level from us—attractive destinations, a robust support team, and excellent speakers. We cannot afford to provide all of that.”
And then I asked a few rhetorical questions. “What if we had to do this in a much smaller city?”
Almost in unison, everyone nodded in acceptance.
“And what if we had to drop to two tracks of seminars, not three?”
More head nodding.
“And reduce our staff?”
More nodding.
“And charge more?”
The heads stopped nodding. Darn, I almost got them on that one...
What a wonderful predicament we have created for ourselves. As the gathering point for a group of embattled graphic designers and publishers and as a reunion for life-long friends, the conference has developed vitality as much for what it symbolizes as for what it actually delivers.
This was all good to hear, and in the face of the Vector acquisition and Corel officials taking responsibility for their problems, it was hard not to view the future with a sense of hope. And as I said to the group, perhaps our retirement should be viewed more like a hiatus.
Give me a year. Let’s give Vector a year. Let’s see if the user community can recapture some of its lost vitality. If the users come back, we’ll come back. It might be Kansas City instead of San Diego, it might not be fresh-squeezed orange juice every morning, but we would like nothing better than to be wrong about our forced retirement. And we’ll be the first ones to ask you to pass the crow.
Copyright 2003, All rights reserved. Have an opinion? Share it with the Corel community at the CorelWORLD Forum. There is already quite a bit of discussion about this story. Join in.
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