History, history
WordPerfect was the original dominant wordprocessor on MS Windows, taking over the marketplace from the older WordStar on MSDOS. It was famous for its "reveal codes" feature which gave you an editable view of the raw ASCII document code. Magic! Rather than make a better product themselves, MS indulged in their usual hated tactics to oust WordPerfect and force their own Word on everybody, and from that grow an office suite to oust Lotus 1-2-3 etc. Corel bought the failing WordPerfect and, bless their cotton socks, kept it on life support until it regained a semblance of consciousness.
Meanwhile, Corel Draw was falling victim to Adobe's equally disreputable selling of their Sh*tware. Xara was a blazlingly fast and easy to use up-and-coming competitor to on Acorn's RISC OS/Archimedes. As the ARM-based OS fell from favour, so too did Xara's sales. They offered their UI to Inkscape, hoping to do a tie-in with Inkscape as the free version and Xara as the much faster pay-for version, but in the end all it did was improve Inkscape no end. Instead, Xara was bought up by Corel, who used its algorithms and UI to refresh Corel Draw. Hats off to the Xara team and RISC OS for the colour picker we have all used to death ever since.
I am amazed and delighted that Corel have the cash to buy anything any more.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
