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© 2003 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
It proceeded with little fanfare and not much attention. One group of dissidents garnered attention with a loud website and even louder allegations, but in the end, the vote by shareholders was a foregone conclusion: Corel shareholders voted overwhelmingly to approve the sale of all common stock and the delivery of controlling interest to an eight-person company in San Francisco, Vector Capital Holdings.
Many of the leaders and the more vested members of the user community got an opportunity to learn a bit about Vector at CorelWORLD ’03, where Chris Nicholson encountered an audience that wasn’t really sure whether to be receptive or skeptical. His candor disarmed the group and many left with a sense of optimism, or at least hope, for the future.
On August 26, one day after the acquisition was approved by the courts, I visited Vector’s headquarters and met with Chris and with Amish Mehta, the principal at Vector who is working directly with Corel’s executives. I left that meeting with a blend of optimism and apprehension. On more times than I can remember, I’ve been on the receiving end of the Corel pep talk that begins with “We’re making some important improvements in the way that we work with ________ [fill in the blank with some critical aspect of the community—existing customers, prospective users, technology partners, independent solution providers].” Invariably, there were no teeth behind the pep talk; it was only natural that I would leave the building on August 26 wondering whether this time it would be any different.
The eternal optimist in me wants to believe that it will. After all, I wasn’t talking to Corel; I was talking to a group that is trying to save Corel. They are a group that knows full well the trouble that Corel got itself into. They watched from the outside, and in many ways, that allowed the conversation to proceed with more candor than usual.
I spoke bluntly about the three areas in which I think Corel has persistently failed in the last five years:
Amish took lots of notes, nodded many times, and indulged in what sounded like his favorite slogan of “fair enough.” But after years of “We assure you that _____ will happen,” fair enough was not an unwelcome response. His assurance to me was that he understood the mistakes that Corel has made over the years and that he would take these issues up directly with Corel’s marketing team.
And therein lies the apprehension. Vector appears willing to allow the existing marketing team to work through Corel’s current problems and proposed solutions. Those people will be free of shareholder pressure and will have more workable budgets, but is that enough? The marketing team today includes several of the people who got them into trouble in the first place. Even if it was not their faults, sometimes you just need new blood and fresh perspective.
Albert Einstein said it best: “Problems,” he said, “cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them.” Vector has stated its unwillingness to change management at Corel, and that means that there will likely be no change in consciousness and culture at Corel. Now if I were Vector co-founder Alex Slusky and I were intending to clean house at Corel, I wouldn’t exactly be going public with that, so we on the outside do not really know the score there. But this much is certain: Corel needs more than a change in direction and in fortune. It needs a change in attitude, in culture, in confidence—as Einstein said, a change in consciousness. Perhaps that can happen with the same people at the helm, and as the replacement for the Board of Directors, Vector had better make sure it does.
Specifically...
•
Vector Capital promises to infuse Corel with money, direction, and a new spirit. Those are very good things, but they are not enough. Vector needs to make sure that mistakes are not repeated and that there is a transfusion at Corel of good blood for bad blood. Whether that means wholesale changes of personnel or just of attitude and culture, that is for Vector to decide. But nothing short of that is going to get the ship turned around, and I hope that Vector appreciates that.
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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