The Other LinuxWorld Expo: Paris Diary
While many went to the LinuxWorld in New York in early February,
others were at the expo in Paris. Bruce went to Paris, and explains why Corel, Mandrake, SuSE, and other Linux
heavies were there; and he tells us about some interesting products, including DemoLinux, RunOnCD, and InUp Software.
By T. Bruce Tober
February 14, 2000
It was easy enough to understand why Jacques Le Marois, chairman of
MandrakeSoft and Roland Dyroff, CEO of SuSE, and even why Colin Tenwick, vice president of RedHat were at the Paris
Linux World Expo rather than the New York Linux World Expo earlier this week. But Michael Cowpland, president and
CEO of Corel?
The first two are heads of European companies, and the third is the head of the European division
of his company.
But Corel is a Canadian-based company.
"Well, we've got a good team and we share up the tasks," Cowpland told me.
But that's not all. He apparently had to be in Europe to get his adrenaline pumping. "We're
world sponsors of bobsleds, so we were at St. Moritz for the annual bobsled run to keep the adrenaline running.
My wife and I both went down in a sled, it's the best way to experience 7G-force. I was once part of the Canadian
bobsledding team.
"And then I was also in Davros for the World Economic Forum. So, it's kind of a very efficient
trip."
It was difficult for me to imagine him getting any more pumped up about anything than he was
about the new Corel Linux distribution. He launched a French version of the distribution while in Europe, as well
as demonstrating the beta version of the WordPerfect 2000 Office suite, which the company has worked full-out porting
to Linux.
I asked him "what's the most exciting thing happening in your life these days?" His
response was very simple, "I think the Linux phenomenon is the most exciting, because we're front and center
of it. And Linux is the next decade of software following on DOS in the '80s, and Windows in the '90s.
Corel got into Linux,
Cowpland told me "Because [Corel] spotted the trend quite early in the curve. And we were in the perfect position
because we have 50 million Windows users and you need a lot of users to move over to Linux to give you a good flying
start, instead of starting from scratch.
"It's not a question of what does WordPerfect do, they know what it does. They know
what our other core products -- Quattro Pro or Presentations or Paradox and Corel Draw and PhotoPaint -- do. So
this way they can immediately be comfortable in Linux and not worry about it only going half way and then getting
quirky or having to worry whether it does footnotes or counts the lines or words of a document properly."
But there are 80 million distributions of Linux, why did Corel do another new distribution rather
than just porting over its software to run under the existing distributions, I asked.
"Well, for a very simple reason. We could see that none of the then current distributions
were easy to use. Everybody said Linux was the best, but you need a day with an expert before you can get it going.
And we knew that was not going to get a desktop mass audience going.
"So we used our skills to make it easier than Windows," he said.
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