Corel Corporation, which has been reeling financially for the past year, announced its first profit in five quarters Wednesday as it dropped its line of Linux hardware. Corel is best known as the current owner of WordPerfect, once the darling of word processing. The company reported a profit of $6.8 million on revenues of $67 million. A year earlier, the company lost $67 million.
"We are extremely pleased with the progress we have made as a company in 1998," said CEO Michael Cowpland. "We have spent a considerable amount of time streamlining our business practices, and we're proud of how far we have come."
The "streamlining" he's referring to includes the sale of its NetWinder hardware unit, which consists largely of Linux and NC boxes. The company will be releasing its new WordPerfect Office 2000 suite sometime by mid-summer
