Corel Cans Bryce For Mac, Bryce 5 To Be The Last

by , 6:00 PM EDT, May 30th, 2003

Many Mac owners love to use Corel's Bryce 5, it is a powerful graphics tool that helped create many of the stunning vistas used in games like Myst. Unfortunately, Bryce for the Mac is going the way of Word Perfect.

Paul Rego wrote TMO with his concerns after contacting Corel. Mr. Rego is a Bryce user and told TMO of his exchange with a Corel sales representative. Mr. Rego wrote with the following::

Today (5/29/03), I just spoke to a sales associate at Corel who told me Bryce has been changed. It's still version 5 but the only difference is that it will no longer work on the Macintosh! They told me they are making note of anyone who contacts them and wants to continue to see Bryce work on the Mac. They also told me Corel will put out an official press release on this next week.

TMO contacted Corel and got this statement from Meredith Dundas, Communications Manager at Corel, about Corel's current support of the Mac version of Bryce 5:

At Corel we continually monitor the sales performances of our products to ensure we capitalize on market trends and opportunities. Through our research we have found that sales for Corel Bryce 5 are strongest with Windows customers, particularly at retail. As a result we have chosen to focus our efforts on Bryce 5 for Windows. We continue to support Bryce 5 for Mac with customer and technical support, and customers who wish to purchase Bryce 5 for Mac can still order licenses through our Corel Inside Sales department by calling 1-877-OK-COREL (1-877-652-6735).

We continue to support the Mac platform with our award-winning graphics products including the recently released Corel Painter 8, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 11, Corel KPT Collection and Corel KnockOut 2.

A translation of that is that Corel is pulling Bryce 5 for Mac from retail shelves, but will still sell it through the company's telephone store. TMO is in the process of gathering more information and will post updates as news becomes available.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Corel, at one time, was a staunch Mac supporter, but over the years things have gotten decidedly sketchy. Many people still lament the loss of WordPerfect for the Mac, stating, and rightfully so, that it was the only real competition to Microsoft's Word. That is slowly changing with some of the open source projects on the horizon, but the loss of WordPerfect was still keenly felt by many Mac users.

The situation is different with graphic applications, however. While Bryce isn't the only graphics tool available for both Macs and PCs, as we have stressed before, variety is the name of the game. If Corel decides to curtail its support for Bryce, it will be one less choice for the Mac. Of course, the irony is that Bryce, like most of the great graphics apps on the market, started its life out on the Mac.

Of course, there will be those who don't use Bryce and could care less if it disappears from the Mac landscape, but we believe that any reduction in support is significant.

Bryce 5