| Summary: | In early 1996, Michael Cowpland, the founder and president of Corel, the world's 11th-largest computer software company, was boasting that his firm would take on Microsoft and within two years steal half of the market for office software “suites,” but 18 months down the line, everything has gone wrong for Corel. Its third-quarter results, which were published on September 22, 1997, reveal continuing losses on sales that have fallen by more than half since the end of 1996. Simultaneously, Corel's product strategy appears to have disintegrated. Apart from the collapse of Corel's plan to introduce a version of its WordPerfect suite based on Java, the Internet programming language currently in vogue, Corel has had to dispose of its recently acquired business selling software for multimedia and computer-aided design. Not unexpectedly, Corel's market value has dropped by over $400 million since Cowpland challenged Microsoft. Details of what went wrong are provided.
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