Vector Capital, which owns about 69% of Corel’s stock wants to buy the remaining shares and has enlisted Genuity Capital to advise the company on its future.

The latest announcement likely means Corel is up for sale and will be bought sometime over the next 12 to 18 months. Corel could still embark upon a new product strategy or take itself private. It’s easy to see why the company is reviewing its strategic options: Corel’s shares have dropped by about 40% since reappearing on the TSX in April 2006.

Anyway, the reason it’ll be sold is that the raison d’etre of a turnaround firm like Vector is to flip its assets for a tidy profit. Vector’s move to buy the remaining Corel shares it doesn’t own is to bring its average cost per company share down; not because it wants to hang onto the company for the long term.

Firms like Vector, upon acquiring an asset such as Corel, typically hack away at operations, bring a strategic focus to a company and eventually resell it to a willing buyer or some such variation.

Assuming Corel is flipped, it’ll be the third owner this decade for users of Corel’s Draw and WordPerfect programs.

Corel, was independently managed and run by founder Michael Cowpland, until 2000 when he left amid allegations of insider trading by the Ontario Securities Commission.

Former CEO Derek Burney, stabilized operations and eventually struck a deal with turnaround firm Vector Capital to save the beleaguered company. The deal of course came after an ill-advised attempt to offer Corel products under different brands.

Dave Dobson, an ex-IBMer of many years, was subsequently installed as CEO once Vector took over; his management team has brought a viable strategic direction missing from the company since well, the company’s release of CorelDraw way back in 1989.

[tags] Corel, Michael Cowpland, Corel Draw, WordPerfect [/tags]

Linux matters in many ways – it is used to handle several types of workloads; it is growing as a server operating environment much like Windows.

The desktop, however, is a very different story. Windows is by far the dominant (client) operating system, a fact of the personal computing world that won’t change anytime soon if ever. Apple may nibble away at Microsoft’s share of Windows-powered computer shipments but Linux on the desktop will remain deep within the computing shadows save for a select group of users.

When discussing the lack of progress Linux has made on the PC, the usual reasons are brought up – a lack of applications, the fact hardware still doesn’t have the appropriate drivers or the fact command line prompts are needed in various instances. Ugh.

Most of those problems can be overcome; some would argue it’s easy to install on a computer. The real reason Linux has failed to grow significantly is apathy; there is no compelling reason to change. People don’t want to install Linux on a computer nor do they feel the need to throw out Windows (for the most part).

That’s because Windows is at the very least good enough for most users needs. It’s also affordable. Scalability and functionality are words you won’t ever hear your parents or grandparents utter, which makes a migration to Linux unnecessary for virtually every person.

There’s also very few channels an interested user can buy a desktop pre-loaded with a Linux distribution. Wal-Mart recently scrapped its in-store Linux PC sales experiment.

Perhaps users in China or other developing countries, where pirated and/or free software is the norm, will make Linux a mainstay on the desktop.

As for the Western world, there is little to no reason for users to scrap their Windows operating systems. In the enterprise, IT and line of business managers are reticent to implement Linux on the desktop for the most part because of the inevitable upheaval the operating system switch will create.

Dell’s support of systems pre-loaded with Ubuntu is a step in the right direction for the Linux community but the vendor charges more for a computer pre-loaded with Ubuntu than it does for one with Vista, presumably due to higher anticipated support costs. But the lack of available support for Linux on the desktop and the lack of available computers pre-loaded with a particular distribution will keep Linux PCs a figment of most people’s imagination for the foreseeable future.

UPDATE: Hewlett-Packard is set to ship personal computers pre-loaded with SuSE Linux, according to Novell executives here at BrainShare. SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop is already preloaded on Dell and Lenovo PCs.

“We are really excited by this deal because of the power that the HP distribution channel brings, the reach they have and their commitment to interoperability,” Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian told eWeek. “I am very enthusiastic about what this relationship could bring.” According to HP, the pre-loaded SLED machines should be available in select regions during the second quarter of this year.

For those PC users that missed it, the company said it will cut prices (in the U.S.) of Windows Vista Ultimate from US$299 to US$219 while the price for an upgrade version of Vista Home Premium will be slashed from US$160 to US$130.

The news made for lively newspaper stories and blog posts on Friday that described the competition between Microsoft and Apple.

It is true Apple’s Leopard OS is a vastly improved product & shipments of its Mac product lineup have jumped sharply in recent years. But competition on the OS front won’t be on Microsoft’s home turf which is the PC hard drive.

More to the point, Microsoft is having some trouble selling its operating system to consumers in part because of the ailing economy in the U.S. and also because XP is good enough negating the need to buy the latest and greatest operating system.

Consumers and businesses may also be waiting to upgrade to Vista’s successor. People have learned over the years it’s best to wait for at least a year after a release date before buying a Microsoft product as bugs and other hiccups have to be worked out.

Others believe Microsoft is losing pricing power, a plausible theory as well.

What’s for sure is that Apple or the Linux camp won’t beat Microsoft at its own game. Further market share gains on the part of Microsoft’s competitors but those companies will never beat Microsoft at its own game.

Nor are the price cuts about some sort of migration to the Web thus negating the need for Vista or any Microsoft OS. It’s that people simply don’t feel the need to upgrade nearly as often. The Vista horror stories, of which there seem to be no shortage of on the Web, have scared people off at least for the meantime. It’s about relevance. It’s harder and harder for ANY OS provider to sell an upgraded version.

The telltale sign of the operating system’s relevance, at least for Microsoft, will be future price cuts. As Nick Carr states: "To get a read on the long-term financial prospects of Microsoft’s core business, don’t focus on the market share report; look at the price tag."

Google introduced its online suite of productivity software today, quashing remaining doubts it’s not a Microsoft competitor.

Another product launch from the Net search king would normally pass without much fanfare. This one is a shot across the bow of Microsoft – Office and Windows are the company’s cash cows – and will not go unnoticed in Redmond, Wash. (Microsoft HQ for software neophytes).

It’s an obvious attempt to steal small business customers and consumers that may be fed up with Microsoft Office. Google’s suite of online applications are free.

Google wants to turns users of its e-mail screening service into messaging (Gmail) users, calendars and eventually move them into hosted productivity applications such as word processing.

It’s a stretch.

Google has great brand recognition and products but consumers and enterprises have used Microsoft Office for decades; it’s easy to use and is relatively affordable. The overwhelming majority of organizations won’t want to rip-and-replace Office applications nor do they want the inevitable upheaval and lost productivity bound to happen if a business of any size was to migrate to Google’s online applications.

Nonetheless, a small percentage of businesses and customers will migrate to Google hosted applications – the company claims to have over 500,000 customers to date. But those businesses likely wouldn’t have ever bought Office.