By Rachel Chalmers in Las Vegas
You’ve got to hand it to Corel Corp. It’s not every day that a company launches a desktop operating system and promises an office application suite calculated to attack Microsoft Corp where its business model is strongest. Yet that’s exactly what Corel CEO Michael Cowpland has done with the announcement of Corel Linux. Cowpland and his staff even managed to make it sound as if they had done the open source developer community a favor, rather than the other way around. This is a very exciting day for Linux, he announced, to rapturous applause, mostly from his employees. Cowpland said that while Red Hat Inc has made great strides towards gaining acceptance for Linux, its product is still seen as server-based, difficult to install and only for experts. By contrast, Corel Linux, based on the Debian kernel and the K Desktop Environment, was designed from the ground up to require no learning curve on the part of the Windows user.
Corel Linux is poised to spill out through the channel and through an OEM deal with PC Chips which could make the Canadian company the world’s largest Linux distributor. We expect a very popular reception, Cowpland said. He went on to betray his biases as a longstanding member of the personal computer industry: This is the operating system for the next ten years. DOS had its ten years, and Windows had its ten years. Now it’s Linux’s turn. Cowpland’s VP of new ventures, Jim Duff, echoed his sentiments. We felt that as a company with our experience, we had a lot to add to the Linux world, he said. We want to be the number one choice among Linux users on the desktop.
As you’d expect from a company whose executives feel this way, Corel’s version of Linux and its office applications are almost indistinguishable from Windows 98 and Office 97. Corel Draw, Quattro Pro and WordPerfect look the same as they ever did, except that they’re running on Debian/KDE. Who’d want an operating system that looks and behaves exactly like Windows, but isn’t? The PC Chips deal is the key: Cowpland, like his Red Hat counterpart Bob Young, is less interested in converting existing users than in winning those new to the market. Where Bob Young wants to put entirely new killer applications in those hands, however, Cowpland seems to wants Corel to beat Microsoft at something, anything, after all this time, just once.
