Ever fancied having an OS within a browser, so that there was a desktop waiting for you in every cybercafe or airport lounge in the world? If so, go to www.youos.com and grab yourself a free account. If you can’t be bothered to do that, just imagine a web page with a wallpaper background and a few icons you can click on, plus a drop down menu at the top left for icon haters.

Does this idea have legs?

I’m not exactly sure. It depends on how it evolves. It would be a good deal more impressive than it currently is, if it ran as the browser itself, rather than from within a window in the browser. The YouOS desktop has a (primitive) browser of its own and if you want to access Zoho you can put that url in the browser-within-a-browser and, at your request, it will open up a new tab in FireFox that displays Zoho. That’s fine, but it feels wrong.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that the idea doesn’t have legs – and it can’t swim either

What’s the difference between Edward John Smith, the Captain of the Titanic and Darl McBride, CEO and President of SCO. Well, for one thing, Captain Smith didn’t steer his doomed ship towards the iceberg, he hit it by accident.

The prospects for SCO now appear to be not much better than they were for the Titanic as it encountered the iceberg. As a Unix business, SCO is sinking quickly. Its revenues for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2004 were 0,075,000, a little more than 40% for the same quarter in the previous year, primarily due to a decline in SCOsource license revenues from 0,316,000 to 20,000 (that would be a decline of just under 99 percent – possibly a record of some kind). Competitive pressure from Linux is clearly a factor in this, but in all probability there are now a whole set of customers and partners who no longer wish to do business with SCO.

It may not have escaped the notice of SCO customers that, of the two Linux users it chose to sue, DaimlerChrysler was actually a customer of SCO and AutoZone had been until 2002 (it ran SCO Unix on its point of sale systems). Someone should have told Darl that adversarial legal action doesn’t amount to good CRM.

Aside from that, the experience of web hosting company, EV1Servers of Houston, which actually paid the fee that SCO was charging for its Linux license and thus became the SCO poster child for its fledgling Linux license business, was far from positive. Within a month or so of doing the deal, CEO Robert Marsh was regretting the move and saying that if he had the chance to do it again, he wouldn’t. No surprise then that the fledgling never flew.

All of a sudden we went from being reasonably good guys to being, in some peoples eyes, akin to the devil. And thats certainly something that weighs heavy on our minds, because we always want to do the right thing.

And this is the point. From a legal perspective, Open Source licenses and intellectual property may be a valid point for debate and legal action, but from a fashion perspective, taking on Linux and Open Source is a stupidity, and severely damaging to an organization’s brand – as SCO has proved quite comprehensively. Open Source is an idea whose time has come. Whether it turns out to be a positive commercial force remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that it is a driving trend in the software business. It is the iceberg that Darl McBride steered SCO into.

All that seems to be left for SCO now is to try to rescue itself through the courts. In fact SCO is now more a legal case than a software company. But even as a legal case, its prospects don’t look good. In 2003, SCO Senior Vice President Chris Sontag claimed that there are millions of lines of offending code involved. Strange then that SCO has not been able to make even a few of those offending lines of code public.

In his recent pronouncement on the IBM v SCO case, U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball chose not to dismiss SCO’s case against IBM, but was fairly scathing in commenting on SCO’s media pronouncements and its inability or unwillingness to furnish any evidence. It seems likely that direct comparison of SCO’s Unix code with Linux code (a comparison that SCO has always been able to make) has not provided proof of anything. SCO now has the chance to survey billions of lines of IBM Unix code in order to try to unearth some IP or copyrighted contribution to Linux, and even then it will still have to prove that such a contribution violated IBM’s contract with SCO – which is not a slam-dunk.

According to a posting on The Motley Fool, CEO Darl McBride received over million salary and a 50,000 bonus, plus thousands of shares and options in 2003 – a healthy reward it seems, for steering SCO into the iceberg. Captain Smith, by the way, went down with his ship.

In the first 4 blog postings of January, I’ll review trends and offer predictions – or, to be more honest – guesses, as to what will happen in the coming year. Please don’t invest money.

Let’s begin with Apple…

I am by no means the only individual who dropped the Microsoft PC in favour of Apple last year. Well over a million people did in the US alone – some prompted by the simple fact that iTunes works so much better if you have an Apple. Some may have been drawn by the fact (as Apple users will attest) that the Mac does not suffer from PC entropy – you know what I mean, after a while that PC simply doesn’t seem to work well any more and nothing you do makes much difference (a typical consumer experience – usually caused by a host of ills from spyware to disk saturation).

Apple continues to make the running in the consumer PC market, deriving its success, to some extent, from the iPod. The latest video iPod has prompted yet another Apple-driven phenomenon. A video download market that works – millions of music videos have already been downloaded and a new market has been established for TV programmes.

It is no small achievement, given that so many different companies have tried to set the video market in motion. What Apple did that made a difference was to deliver every piece of the service (the alliances with content providers, the web site, the software, the desktop hardware and the personal device). I doubt whether dominating the market for video is going to be as easy as dominating the market for music, but I expect Apple to do it anyway. Only Sony has the ability to challenge Apple right now – but it doesn’t have the creativity.

Apple’s latest quarterly figures ($3.68 billion reported in October) suggest a current run rate of about $15 billion p.a. With revenue growth in the region of 68 percent, we may be looking at $25 billion revenues this time next year.

I cannot see anything slowing Apple’s growth in the near term. Indeed Apple is probably about to increase the pace a little more. MacWorld occurs this month and Steve Jobs probably has a few surprise products to launch – including the first fruits of his Intel partnership. I imagine that both Sony and Microsoft are more than a little concerned at Apple’s momentum.

When Douglas Levin was a boy, he had a black duck as a pet. So when, in 2002, he founded a company to analyze source code and determine its origins, he chose to call it Black Duck. I like the name and, to be honest, I like the technology.
What the technology does is analyze source code and “finger print” it. (To be precise, it maps the pattern of the code, but it’s easier to think of it as a fingerprint). It can then look at code and determine its origin, with some degree of certainty. Even code that is not identical or partly rewritten can be identified. This is a useful capability because companies can “black duck” the applications they’ve written and make sure that no code has been pilfered from SourceForge and added in, in violation of some Open Source license. (Black Duck has some customers that have had to do a little recoding because they discovered such chunks of code).

It’s useful for companies whose business is to write software. It’s also useful for IT Departments that might like to know if Open Source has crept into their applications. It can also be used to test any code against any code, and thus the technology is often used under non-disclosure.

With the advent of web services, I expect Black Duck (which is already doing quite well) to prosper. It’s a viable business, made more viable by the current enthusiasm for the regulation of IT.

I have it on good authority, by the way, that Black Duck has not been used by SCO in the SCO v IBM dispute. Clearly it is the right technology for the job, but Black Duck has no desire to get involved. The sad fact is that SCO has become so radioactive that some companies don’t even want SCO as a customer. A friend of mine, who recently had cause to visit SCO on business, made me laugh by referring to Lindon, Utah (where SCO is headquartered), as Chernobyl. Presumably, he packed lead underwear before getting on the plane.

A correspondent pointed out to me last week that SCO is a known acronym in the nuclear industry for something that is radioactive. It stands for Surface Contaminated Object.

Normalisation (Normal Forms)

A satanic ritual carried out by database designers. A group of them assemble, draw a pentangle on the floor, light candles and sacrifice a goat. They then invoke the five demons of Thoth, or the “five normal forms” as they are sometimes called. At the end of the ritual a database design manifests from the netherworld. The full details of how this is done is a closely guarded secret, understood only by a few database masters and revealed only to initiates. I daren’t say more.

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