Future of Corel & Should I Switch to Adobe?

[JohnnyReb]

Can someone give me an educated guess as to the financial status of Corel and if they are going to continue to support Draw in the long term? Also, any recommendations for switching to Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop? I've been using Corel for a while but wanted to take some advanced training, but only if the future of Draw is certain.

[JohnnyReb]

Can someone give me an educated guess as to the financial status of Corel and if they are going to continue to support Draw in the long term? Also, any recommendations for switching to Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop? I've been using Corel for a while but wanted to take some advanced training, but only if the future of Draw is certain.

[Peter Clifton]

It's no secret that Corel are not in the best of financial shape at the moment.

But hopefully the new CEO can turn things around.

Despite all the deviations along the way in the past decade the fundamental core of Corel has always been the Draw suite. I have less concerns about this package surviving than other packages in Corel's stable.

As well as the Draw suite I also rely on Ventura to get my job done and Corel are not even marketing this app.

I still think the Draw suite is the best all round computer illustration package on any system at any price.

Whilst Photoshop is undoubtebly the best photo editing package, I still find PhotoPaint allows me to do everything I need and cannot justify the 400 UKP extra to purchase it.

Illustrator even in it's latest version is not a patch on Draw, at this moment in time it could not replace even Draw 7, which I use at work along with my own automation scripts and several third party add on tools.

The interfaces of these two Adobe packages are also IMHO much harder to get to grips with and less productive than Corel's, which the more I learn about it the more I come to appreciate it. Even though I did have to customize Draw 9 to get it back the way I like it, at least it was possible

I guess jumping ship is down to personal choice, if you think you can do everything in Illustrator / PhotoShop and you are unconvinced of Corel's long term future who is to say don't do it.

Me I'm sticking around for a while. whether Corel sinks or swims in the long term is going to have little immediate effect on me as I still have the packages they have already released to rely on.

This may change if Corel is no longer around and the packages no longer run on the inevitable operating system updates but that is a couple years away at least.

I just hope they don't kill off Ventura before they release a new fully Win2000 compliant version, as for me that would be a real tragedy.

Peter

[Not Ziggy]

Adobe and Corel are like two marketing majors who graduated from the same college with completely different philosophies and put them to the test. Mr. Corel, who had once been an engineering major, said, "I'll offer the most product possible for the money and people will flock to our company. The value we offer will generate tremendous brand loyalty and we'll get rich on volume." Each time one of his programmers came up with a new idea, which was about every fifteen minutes, Mr. Corel simply included it with the next annual edition of his product. Unfortunately, he had the artistic sensibilities of a Las Vegas casino owner and his product quickly developed a reputation as an overly complex tool for geeks only. To this day, Mr. Corel continues to place ads in national graphics magazines that position his product as an effects generator for the aesthetically challenged. As a consequence, his product is dismissed contemptuously by anyone with even a smidgen of social grace.

Meanwhile, Ms. Adobe, who had previously been a psychology major, said, "I'll offer the least product possible for the money because people are basically afraid of computers and the most important thing is to help them work slowly and deliberatly." Consequently, she surrounded herself with the best dressed programmers she could find. Every few years, when one of them reluctantly heard about some new idea, Ms. Adobe would come out with a new and separate product (TypeAlign, After Effects, etc.) which people could master at their leisure. Happily for her, the very same public which buys a magazine for the amount of flesh on its cover and would never vote for a third-party candidate (since no one else is doing so), are easily convinced that since Adobe Design Collection (which is basically CorelDraw without the 2000 fonts) costs four times as much as Draw, it must be more valuable.

Guess which company is financially sound ten years later, and which company just fired its founder?

I, for one, will certainly continue using and promoting CorelDraw even if it ceases to officially exist, since Illustrator 9 is roughly comparable to Draw 4.

[This message was edited by Ziggy on September 14, 2000 at 02:21 PM.]

[garvoon]

Ziggy...

Excellent write-up!

I've actually taken Illustrator classes, and to this day, still feel very uncomfortable with it's lack of automated functions.

And if Corel, on occasion, would stop with the fixing of unbroken wheels...

Good piece!

Gary G.