Apple has the chance of Steve Jobs’ entire life to take on Adobe and Microsoft in just one shot, how? Easy, if Apple merges itself with Corel, which market value is US$231,552,240, polishes Corel applications to meet the Mac guidelines, drop those applications that don’t represent a good chance to dominate any market segment, puts some resources in Corel Wordperfect, which the last time I used it in the ancient Mac OS 9 was an excellent application that took advantage of all the Apple technologies by that time, Office looked dull when compared with Wordperfect.

1) In the recent transformation of Adobe into a Microsoft-like model delaying mac applications and acting as if the mac platform were a second-class citizen, slow in fixing bugs that plague their mac versions of their suites , slow in adapting to new features of the new Mac OS X, slow in providing Flash version to the iPhone, high prices for softwares with few new features and too many products that overlap each others and only help to create confusion to people, promising Windows only versions of their applications and letting the mac community in the dust.

With a possible Apple-Corel merger, Apple can force Adobe to rethink its mac strategy and invest more time refining their mac applications and at the same time reduce the dependency on Adobe on the Graphic Design market, that has been an important part of Apple’s history.

2) Kill Corel applications for Windows
Merging with Corel gives Apple another victim with the same shot, Apple could terminate further development of Corel applications for Windows based PCs and provide to customers an affordable migration offer to the mac. This could hurt the Windows already damaged reputation because Corel is well known among Windows users, those that won’t jump to any Adobe offering.

This is a real possibility for Apple if Steve Jobs want to go on the offensive, Apple users have been forced to use and pay for half baked applications that don’t use all the features provided by the latest version of Mac OS X, something that has made them slow when compare with the Windows version.

Giveng that Apple’s bank account is full of green bills doing nothing, paying US$231,552,240 for Corel in cash or in Apple’s shares is a wise investment move and gaining powerful applications like Coreldraw, Wordperfect, Paintshop Pro, Painter and others could only helps Apple becomes one of the major application developer in the world, putting Microsoft and Adobe under control.