The Bloor Perspective: BeOS, Novell and the web faces the Reaper

Those BeOS guys have got a lot to answer for. First of all they go out and produce their own operating system, which is free of charge and easy to use. Then they let their engineers go out and develop yet more operating systems in their spare time. Now it seems that there are more operating systems out there than there are people who care about them.

The latest one is NewOS. It's not finished yet but it boots on a couple of platforms and the source is going to be published so you'll be able to tinker with it.

While BeOS is a bit of fun with a personal version that can be downloaded for free and supports most of the major hardware combinations, it isn't an infallible product that can be used for all purposes - but then again it's not supposed to be. It's well suited to use within internet appliances with limited functions and that's where Be has positioned it.

The creator of NewOS, Travis Geiselbrecht, has published loads of information on his website for free download, but has little or no actual documentation.

Unfortunately for Travis his hobby seems to have been picked up by the open source geek community.

There are a number of references to NewOS on Slashdot, where it appears that the fact that it has no networking capabilities is going to pose a problem for large-scale enterprises. In the meantime, its ability to run on the Sega Dreamcast could have far reaching implications for the likes of Oracle and Microsoft whose products have yet to penetrate that platform.

As a general point, OS developers like Travis are clearly good at what they do and get a great deal of enjoyment out of it. To some extent, they also need the internet community to crash-test their work and provide feedback.

However, they should be wary of the possible consequences of putting this stuff online. There will always be some mad fool that latches onto it and could try to make it something that it was never intended to be.

Are any of these OSes ever going to threaten the open source dominance of Linux? Unlikely. However, those who witnessed the rise of Linux from geeky hobby OS to credible enterprise alternative would never say never...

Novell struggles

Novell has announced another loss-making quarter as the economic downturn continues to cause mayhem in the US. Revenues were down two per cent - caused by a four per cent drop in the US. Other regions managed a small increase but were unable to balance out the much bigger US figures.

Figures for the second fiscal quarter revealed total revenues of $241m and a loss of $151m. A large part of this was due to writing down the value of equity stock by $142m during the quarter.

This compares rather unfavourably with the figures from the previous year, which showed a profit of $31m on revenues of $302m. Novell's immediate plan is to return the company to profitability within the next six months by shedding five per cent of its workforce (260 employees) and taking a close look at some of its costs.

The last quarter showed a $4m increase in costs as the effects of the annual wage-round took effect and the costs of spinning-off Volera came into consideration. However, the biggest impact has been the fifth successive quarter in which revenues from the US have declined.

These figures look far worse than they are because of the reduction in stock value and there seems little doubt that Novell's ability to make small adjustments in Q3 that will result in profitability by the end of the fiscal year.

The question is whether these small measures will be enough in the long term. Novell continues to go through these patches of indifferent performance despite having some of the strongest infrastructure products available in the marketplace. It is still a business in transition as it attempts to break free from the shackles of its NetWare past and to reinvent itself as a network services solutions provider

A key move has been the decision to give away its directory technology to solutions developers and free licences to users of those solutions. This will create increased demand for Novell's technology and ramp up demand for its services. This should allow us to see Novell in its full reincarnation - a net services organisation with support from strong infrastructure technology.

Death of the web predicted

It's fair to say that we often miss portents of the obvious which are right under our noses and that we unreasonably expect the status quo to remain unchanged for longer than it does. It's also fair to say that every analyst group needs to try to grab the headlines from time to time.

You could take Forrester Research's announcement of the impending death of the web either way.

Forrester was undoubtedly the first analyst group to focus almost exclusively on web and internet matters. It has since had to tolerate upstarts such as Gartner, Meta and Bloor Research encroaching on its territory.

"Time for a counter-attack", thinks Smithers in PR. "How can we grab the headlines and reclaim our rightful place? I know the dot-com world which we heralded is down on its knees so we'll be the first to say the web is dead."

Too cynical? Let's examine the arguments then. The basis for Forrester's assertion is that the web is "dumb, boring and isolated", too given to simply reproducing the content of other media but electronically. As a consequence, so the reasoning of Forrester goes, there will be a new internet, which it imaginatively titles "Internet X". Internet X will be made interactive through executables you use once and then throw away (I think they mean Java applets) and access to it will be pervasive, through chips in every kind of device that runs on electricity (like WAP phones).

Forrester's criticism of web content as too passive and static is fair enough but that's already changing. I haven't actually seen a picture of John Prescott on the web that reproduces his left hook in action but those jerky images you get on porn sites illustrate that it can easily be done already.

And the idea that the web will be accessible from toasters, fridges, Barbie dolls, and so forth has been expressed many times over without anyone explaining why you would want it. People who talk to their fridges from their cars are usually shipped off to the local home for the bewildered when they get caught doing it.

And rightly so, it's in their own best interests.

So nice try, Forrester and a successful one in one sense. If the ploy was to grab headlines, it succeeded. The news sites all seem to be carrying the story, including this one now.

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