WinZIP sold and needs technical improvements.

Henk on sharewareblogs.com is reporting that WinZIP has been sold to Vector Capital, which is the company that owns Corel, JASC, and Real Networks. I hope Nico Mak and company received the appropriate compensation for their years of work.

Only time will tell if the new owners do more than just change some icons and increase the price for the WinZIP software. I hope they improve the performance on B2ZIP and GZIP compressed TAR files so that decompression can go on-the-fly. Currently WinZIP writes the new ZIP file to a temp file and then copies it to the final destination. However, this is very inefficient when archiving a very large home directory to a USB storage device. There should be an option to have WinZIP write directly to the destination file without creating a intermediate temporary file.