May 2005: As Adobe’s Shadow Grows, Is Corel Better off or Worse?

© 2005 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.

You have no doubt heard the news by now: Adobe is making a bid for acquisition that will likely see Macromedia becoming the latest absorptee. That might not be an actual word, but in today’s every-smaller-fish-gets-eaten-by-a-bigger-fish society, it deserves to be added to the lexicon.

There is little doubt that this merger has Darth Vader-like undertones for anyone trying to do business in this space. To whatever extent Macromedia kept Adobe (choose one): in line, on its toes, at bay, the publishing world will now do without such checks and balances. And in a show of false modesty that would have made Bill Gates proud, Adobe officials insist that they needed this acquisition to avoid being further dominated by Microsoft.

So let’s see if we have this straight. One publishing giant swallows whole another publishing giant to create an even bigger publishing giant, and it is done in the name of defense against the office giant. And if my enemy’s enemy is my friend, does that mean that Corel and Microsoft are now friends? Oh yeah… WordPerfect.

To be sure, it is a complicated world in which we live. I was prepared to wax pessimistic for those in the Corel community. On the face of it, what good could be seen in the biggest fish in the pond becoming bigger? Does Corel have any realistic hope of competing with Adobe straight up in any of its arenas? Well, no, it doesn’t, and if there were any illusions to the contrary, they were snuffed out with this merger. Think about it: Adobe stands to own PostScript, Acrobat, and now Flash – that is the content creator’s trifecta. It’s game, set, and match in the professional publishing and graphics space, and Corel can only hope to play around the edges.

But in a conversation with Nick Davies, Corel’s General Manager for Graphics Software, he raised an interesting point in all this: Corel is now the No. 2 player in the game.

Are you laughing at the absurdity of that notion, as I initially did? What kind of perverse ignominy are we talking about here, taking satisfaction in moving up a peg because the two organizations before you became one? But let the man finish: “Retailers need to carry the market leader and they need to carry an alternative. Distributors that have turned to Freehand and Fireworks as the alternatives will now need to look elsewhere. And we think that they’ll look to us.”

It’s not so crazy, actually. In fact, Corel has scratched out a decent living the last several quarters playing the other guy. If the company can sharpen that focus as the other guy, and if that gets software a bit deeper into the sales channels, that can only help.

The other positive that could come out of this, speaking of focus, is to make it clear that Corel’s focus cannot be on the professional market, as the industry defines it. Many paragraphs have appeared in this space in the last 18 months about how Corel’s best destiny is as a supplier of quality graphics products to the business community. This move confirms and reinforces our position that Corel’s target cannot be the Illustrator user who should be using CorelDraw instead, or the Photoshop user who should have some ipephaneous moment of clarity and switch to PhotoPaint.

It should be the MS Word user who has no idea what a graphic is but has been told that she needs to have them. It should be the Excel user who is frustrated by the terrible charting that plagues that program. It should be the tens of millions who will buy their first or their second digital camera this year. And above all, it should be the PowerPoint user who needs a handy and affordable graphics tool for the estimated 30,000,000 presentations delivered every…single day.

You can make book on the fact that Adobe will consolidate and integrate some of its overlapping tools. And the likelihood is high that an all-in-one suite will be introduced that will have potential appeal to the business graphics user. And Adobe officials will probably take a stab at getting the attention of Office users; it would cost them little to try. The problem for Corel is one of proportion: What Adobe would define as a “stab” is not far removed from Corel’s entire annual marketing budget.

It will take about 18 months for this merger to be approved, structured, planned, and implemented. That window is Corel’s opportunity and never before has the time been so right to make a concerted and aggressive push into the business graphics space. Here are the things that Corel needs to do to accomplish this:

• Continue to offer a $249 upgrade. While this sounds condescending to those of us who use the product professionally, an Office user would view a graphics package as a “utility,” and the invisible water mark on the wall to spend on a utility is $250.
• Be everywhere that Office users are and be proactive about educating the masses. A lot of these users think that a graphics tool is the set of four built-in shapes that can be created from the Drawing toolbar, and they have no idea the difference between a vector and a bitmap.
• Have relevant demos on how PhotoPaint can touch up any photo and how Draw can create importable graphics for any purpose whatsoever.
• For the IT guys, show how graphic format issues can be a thing of the past. Show them how Draw can import even a PDF file and then re-export it as a metafile or a PNG file that flows seamlessly into a company’s workflow.
• Rename the program back to CorelDraw. Corel Graphics Suite is an air-puffed mouthful that says nothing.
• Leverage the popularity of Paint Shop Pro and create an entire sub-culture of chic around using it. These users have practically been an underground cult. It’s time to give them their day in the sun.
• And to that end, address the confusion around having three image-editing programs in one family. Painter is a hit with the Mac, understood. But does Corel really need two image editors under Windows? You can make a case for this logically, but practically, the risk is too high that users will be confused and just head for Photoshop.
  
  Should Corel decide to integrate PSP and Paint, the resulting product should be named Paint Shop Pro. There are just way too many users out there to make any other choice.
• And if Corel does that, its next move should be to turn PSP into a verb. Put this down in the pet-peeve category, but we’re tired of hearing it said, and indeed having to say it ourselves on occasion, that “you just need to photoshop the background.” We might not be able to get away with “photopainting an image,” but it’s conceivable that one day we might be able to “paint shop that dark photo.”

Corel has some breathing room. For the first time since it found itself in the short-lived Linux frenzy back in 1999, it has the modest luxury of being able to look past its next quarterly results. The time is now to think about which corner the company can turn to ensure long-term solvency and prosperity in a market niche in which it can make a significant contribution. The Graphics Suite is such a good set of tools for the unsuspecting business user that it is capable of literally improving the lives of the people who become introduced to it.

CorelDraw: it makes life better.

This could be a singular message from the company as it enters the post-Macromedia era.

Copyright 2005, All rights reserved. Have an opinion? Share it with the Corel community at the Graphics Unleashed Discussion Forum. There is already quite a bit of discussion about this story. Join in.

May 2007: As simple as possible, but not simpler... · April 2007: Killer Keystrokes · March 2007: Resolution Confusion · January 2007: Fearless Forecasts for 2007 · November 2006: Epiphanies at PowerPoint Live 2006 · August 2006: Escaping Death by PowerPoint · July 2006: Notes from the Floor of InfoComm · June 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--Making Movies for Business and Pleasure, Part II · May 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--From Photos to DVDs · April 2006: It’s Your Music!--Overcoming the oppressive restrictions of iTunes · March 2006: CorelDraw X3—A few must-haves and a few missed opportunities, all in all, a credible upgrade · February 2006: Making Windows Inhabitable · January 2006: Fearless Forecasts for 2006 · September 2005: Just What is a Background Anyway? · August 2005: Meet David Dobson, Corel's New CEO · July 2005: Community, Blind Dates. and Albert Einstein: An Interview with the PowerPoint Live Conference Host · June 2005: CorelWorld 2005: Image Editors, Executive Appearances, and Krispy Kremes · May 2005: As Adobe's Shadow Grows, Is Corel Better off or Worse? · March 2005: Delivering Your Presentation: How Close to the Source Can You Get? · February 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation Part II · January 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation · November 2004: A Killer Deal for Corel Or Another Distraction? · September 2004: The Scourge that is Kazaa and AOL Instant Messenger · August 2004: The Golden Triangle: Presenter, Audience, and Slides · July 2004: A Blast from the Past: How Fast is Fast Enough? · June 2004: Guilty Pleasures · May 2004: A Personal Wish List for PowerPoint 12 · April 2004: Eyedropping: Version 12 makes a good tool even better... · March 2004: Deadly Sins Of Modern PowerPoint Usage · February 2004: Is the even-numbered curse finally over? · January 2004: Another take on Achieving Absence of Ugliness · November 2003: What can we do it again??--Debut of PowerPoint Live Leaves Unquenchable Thirst with the Host · September 2003: Corel Corp. Has a New Custodian · July 2003: Candor and Contrition at CorelWORLD · June 2003: What a Long, Great Trip It’s Been! · May 2003: The Boat that Corel is Missing · April 2003: No Fooling...Is Corel Breaking Up? · March 2003: The Annual Design-a-Brochure Contest · February 2003: Symbolism is Everything · January 2003: Mania, Our Semi-Annual Pilgrimage to Holland · October 2002: On Creativity, Problem-Solving, and Paper Bags · July 2002: CorelDRAW 11: Surprise, Surprise... · May 2002: The Sound of Silence: What does it mean when a company plays its cards so close to its chest? · April 2002: The Art and Science of Presentation Graphics--Creating for the Screen Has its own Challenges · March 2002: CorelDRAW 11: What kind of personality and attitude should a software program have today? · February 2002: Oy, my aching fingers... · December 2001: Digital Photography · November 2001: Can we say goodbye to the Rolls Royce Mentality? · October 2001: An Unforgettable Week: The drama that unfolded around CorelWORLD · August-September 2001: The Art of Paragraphics: New-age ingredients for success with Corel VENTURA · July 2001: Your Very Own Interface: How to make Corel applications read your mind · June 2001: Fighting the Font Wars: How to stay sane with your sans · May 2001--Turning the Key at Nicholas-Applegate · April 2001--A Modest Proposal for Reviving VENTURA Publisher

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