The Bloor Perspective: Boo's back baby, ISPs go global and Microsoft's Whistler

Boo, the ill-fated fashion e-tailer, is back on the internet. The site has been launched with Hollywood-style "Boo.com - the sequel" fanfare, but without the Hollywood-style marketing budget of its original launch. This time round the guerrilla marketing campaign has a budget of a mere $1m in marked comparison to the original's $40m advertising blitz.

Whether or not the new site will succeed has yet to be seen. The original site has almost become a byword for the excessive spending of dot-com entrepreneurs. None but the most persistent of shoppers would have had the patience to wait for the complex graphics and animations to load so they could actually see what the site had to offer. Fashionmall, the new owner of Boo, claims that since the demise of the original site 35,000 people per week have been logging on to the site and for the last two months visitors have been invited to register their interest in the new launch.

Assuming that there is no such thing as bad publicity and the content of the site lives up to its promises, the revised Boo may prove to be a success. As the launch publicity states, style never dies - but poor websites do and that is something the new Boo mustn't forget.

*Surfing all over the world*

Seven ISPs from around the world - @nifty (Japan), EarthLink (USA), Netvigator (Hong Kong), SingNet (Singapore), T-Online (Germany), Unitel (Unitel/Samsung Corporation, Korea) and UOL (Brazil) - have announced a global alliance that could improve services on the internet significantly. The seven, co-ordinated by the @nifty ISP, are aiming to work together on a number of projects that could set internet standards for others to follow while, at the same time, enabling subscribers to get cheaper worldwide access to online services.

The main areas of interest for this joint venture are roaming services, content and ecommerce while also exchanging information about local market conditions and technology. The key capability is likely to be enabling users to access their home services while abroad. This will be achieved using local cheap rate calls to the closest partner service.

Naturally, the seven ISPs claim that this alliance is the first of its kind - certainly it is the largest - and the opportunities for them to expand their reach are enormous. What is more, this expansion can be achieved through collaboration, rather than through massive investments in technology that would put them into direct competition with the other ISPs. It becomes a mutual self-help alliance where some subscribers (those that travel extensively) will eventually gain some benefit.

There is also potential, as the group claims, for this alliance to break new ground in the development of internet services so that practical standards for interoperation can be established. These methods could then be adopted by others either to expand the existing alliance or to create new ones.

Proof of the concept followed by further expansion must be in the minds of the seven participants. Representation is very much biased towards the Eastern service providers with little support from European or South American suppliers. It is difficult to see any eventual programme of standards succeeding without broader support from key areas such as Scandinavia, the Middle East/Central Asia and even China.

It will be interesting to watch the progress of this alliance to see if, eventually, we might all benefit from cheaper access and better services.

*Waiting for the final Whistler*

The first beta release of the unified version of Windows - code-named 'Whistler' - has just been released to key Microsoft partners and customers, as well as software developers, for evaluation. It is beginning to look as though, after all the years of pain and anguish, Microsoft might actually be about to turn Windows into something we can use.

So far, it looks like Whistler won't offer major advances on the existing Windows 2000 environment. Instead, the emphasis is on the unification of the home and enterprise platforms. This means ditching the prehistoric DOS foundation for desktop users in favour of the NT platform and then taking a whole host of user interface improvements that exist within Windows 98 and migrating them into Whistler. In this way, many of the weak spots of both operating systems can be lost and their strengths can be consolidated.

The 32-bit desktop version of Whistler is expected in the latter half of 2001 and will feature a much stronger role for Internet Explorer and a single personalised identity that can be authenticated across the web. Other features such as the Control Panel have usability improvements and the SAPI speech-recognition interface is expected to be included. A 64-bit version will follow soon after the initial release. Whistler will also represent a large step forward for the .NET strategy that will be completed in the follow-up release, code-named 'Blackcomb', due in 2002.

We all know that early releases of new Windows versions tend to be buggy but it seems that this time there is a whole year to iron out some of the basic issues of compatibility and hardware management that usually crop up. The major changes seem to be architectural, with the incorporation of the first parts of the .NET strategy. This means that most of the visible features will be familiar and largely unchanged.

The biggest problem is likely to be the bloating that results from combining two environments. Home users won't want to use many of the management features that are used by business users and the games interfaces will never be used in the workplace - will they?