Following a conference call with a significant IT security vendor this week, I have decided to make AVID (Anti-Virus Is Dead) a semi-regular item in this blog. In AVID I will chart the gradual demise of signature-based anti-virus technology as it is superseded—as it inevitably will be—by technology that actually does the job. So AVID will continue to appear until some IT security expert convinces me that AV technology has a legitimate role in the computer world or hell freezes over.

The conference call, by the way, was subject to non-disclosure, so I can’t report on its content in any detail. As the company (a significant vendor in the IT security market) had contacted me because of my previous blog posting about AV, I had expected to be faced with a strongly dissenting opinion. Not so. Following a frank conversation, the company’s security expert and I ended up vigorously agreeing on most points of the argument. I also discovered that this vendor will (at some point) be launching a product that I may be able to add to the list of products from Bit9, Securewave and AppSense that do the AV job properly—and then some. If the company wants to call this product AVID, it has my blessing.

I am tempted to invoke the well-worn cliché and declare that the AV emperor has no clothes. However that would be unfair. The AV emperor is not entirely naked. Clothes he surely has, but unfortunately they do not entirely preserve his modesty. Indeed, from where I’m standing his privates are embarrassingly visible—and I’m not talking about the guys in uniform that are marching in front of him.

There were enough references to “apocalypse” in the press stories covering the New Orleans catastrophe for me to find out what the word “apocalypse” actually means. The word comes from Greek and it means an “unveiling” or “revealing”. “Apocalypse” is a uniquely Christian idea stemming from “The Revelation of St John The Divine” – a tract of the New Testament that is supremely difficult to fathom.

A healthy number of Christians believe that there will be an era of flood, fire, war and earthquake, followed by “the rapture” when the righteous will receive their reward and the less than righteous will be consigned to a place where caviar is unobtainable and there are no swimming pools. If that happens, it’s going to come as a shock to quite a few people, including me.

There are more prosaic “end of the world” scenarios in the offing nowadays, although an analysis of all of the ones I’ve identified suggests that humanity would probably survive.

Here’s a potted list:

1. Nuclear war, or terrorist with atom bomb: A global nuclear war now seems unlikely, but a limited action would destroy a city or even several. It would contaminate the atmosphere and pose an ongoing health problem among the billions of survivors. Could happen. Requires a mad man with an agenda.
2. Chemical weapons: Nasty but not world threatening.
3. Biological weapons or disease outbreaks: Even the Black Death only culled a third of Europe. AIDS has been tragic but not world stopping. The biological threat has lessened despite scientific attempts at various times to create a superbug.
4. Earthquake: A really big one would still only be local. Even worst case (say force 9 in California of Pacific NorthWest) the casualties would (only) number in the millions.
5. Volcanic explosion: The biggest known threat is the supervolcano that lies below Yellowstone National Park in the US. It’s big. The caldera is about as big as the whole park. At worst this could wipe out most of the US and cause atmospheric dust that would deliver a non-nuclear “nuclear winter” – very handy for a globally warming world, I might say. This would certainly kill billions, but man would probably get through it. The last explosion of this type happened about 74,000 years ago – or so my dad tells me.
6. Asteroid: The sad truth is that if one were heading towards us, we’d probably not spot it and if it were large enough then it would be every bit as bad as a supervolcano. Some of us would probably get through, but it would ruin your whole summer.

Have I missed anything? Of course I have. I’ve missed the one most likely to happen – the rise in sea levels. There is actually only one big threat here. The sea level could rise a foot or two because of global warming in the next 50 years, and that would make life very difficult in many coastal areas, but the real threat is the Ross Ice Shelf in the Antarctic.

This is a shelf of ice that varies between 600-3000 feet in thickness, which could drop into the sea. It’s the size of France and guesses suggest that it would raise the sea level by 15 to 20 ft. It could happen quickly and some credible commentators suggest that it is due to do so in a 20 to 50 year time frame. If this happens you can wave goodbye to New York, San Diego, San Francisco, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Shanghai, London, Holland, the rebuilt New Orleans and, actually, most of the world’s commercial centers.

It’s not the worst disaster that could happen, but it is the only one that is predicted to occur in the near future and could be prepared for. So, naturally, no-one is preparing for it.

Unfortunately “end of the world” predictions have a bad rep. There have been 200 or so that have passed their “sell-by” date in recent times. (To be honest most if these were wacky at best.) Predictions about the behaviour of the Ross Ice Shelf have a much better pedigree. But they suffer from the fact that the consequences are too great to contemplate (“It makes my head hurt”).

Anyway, better to be sorry than safe.

Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss made perfect sense to me. Red Hat has far more credibility if it is providing a whole software stack than if it is just offering various Linux packages. Also both Red Hat and JBoss have been targeting the corporate market and, as a single company, there should be significant economies of scale open to it. It also evens up Red Hat’s competitive battle with Novell.

I have been a fan of JBoss for quite a while because the technology road map looks well thought out to me—although I feel that JBoss needs to be asking for license fees on some of its products that are currently free. It had enough of a portfolio to do that. Maybe Red Hat will make that move. A viable strategy on how to make a commercial success—and I mean healthy revenue growth—from Open Source needs to be articulated.

The acquisition creates a conundrum for Novell, because JBoss is (or was) a significant partner. A phenomenon of Open Source has been that a single product normally emerges in any given category. Firefox (browser), Linux (OS), Apache (Web Server) and JBoss (middleware stack) are all examples. The only market where more than one product seems to have emerged is database—which is dominated by MySQL, but also served by FireBird, SleepyCat, Ingres and others. The acquisition is not good news for Novell.

Oracle to Market Linux?

Larry J Ellison of Oracle was quick to rain on Red Hat’s parade. A few days after the JBoss acquisition, he remarked, in a Financial Times interview, that Oracle might distribute its own version of Linux. Red Hat’s shares sank 7% immediately. Ostensibly the motivation is to help Oracle compete with Microsoft’s SQL Server stack (middleware plus SQL Server plus Windows). Larry mentioned that he had considered acquiring Novell. Rumour has it that Larry had also considered acquiring JBoss, but backed off.

Larry did, however, acquire the Open Source SleepyCat database about a month ago and picked up two small MySQL partners prior to that. As he indicates in the FT interview, Oracle intends to exploit Open Source rather than compete with it. In that respect that acquisition of Novell would make sense because Novell has a good deal more than a sack-full of Open Source products in its portfolio and some—such as its ID management software and NetWare.

I only mentioned Parallels Inc. last week, en passant, while I was discussing Apple’s next version of OS X. I never had time to look into what Parallels has, because I only picked up the news about Parallels Workstation software the day I was writing the blog. This week I took a look. What Parallels has is Microsoft’s worst nightmare.

Quite simply it is what I expect Apple to provide—the ability to run Windows-in-a-box, a little like the old DOS box that runs in Windows. The main point to note is that when you run it, it looks like OS X is the master OS, and that’s not surprising because Windows is running in a virtual machine. If you just see a screen shot of this you quickly get a sense of what it means. If Apple wasn’t going to virtualize Windows, just one look at Parallels’ capability would change Steve Jobs mind anyway.

Unfortunately for Parallels, Apple will probably provide this capability. What I hadn’t appreciated until I saw it with my own eyes is that it completely destroys the Microsoft lock-in. “… and with one bound, the consumer was free”.

This is the point that commentators like John Dvorak (who’s been watching the PC market forever and who correctly predicted Apple’s move to Intel) and Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group are missing. Both of them have been flamed mercilessly by the Apple devout for suggesting recently that Apple might eventually drop OS X and OEM Windows instead. You’ll see icebergs floating down the river Styx before that happens.

It is now possible for Windows to share a screen with OS X. So now, Apples will surely be compared with apples, and the Apples will win. A door stands open on the North wall of the Windows penitentiary. Now you may think that this is a two-way door, but it isn’t. Aside from the obvious fact that few people will want to break into prison, this door doesn’t swing both ways. Windows users will be able to migrate to Apple easily enough, but it will be difficult for Apple users to move in the other direction. OS X will only be available on Apple. (Apple wont sell OS X on any other hardware any time soon—it makes no business sense). And that puts the boot firmly on the other throat.

Perhaps Microsoft is about to experience its ‘mainframe moment’, like IBM did around 1990.

You may think I’m being a bit ‘previous’ here, and I am. But Parallels doesn’t just provide a capability for OS X, it also provides the same capability for other PCs. You can virtualize Linux from Windows. You can virtualize different versions of Windows. What is happening here is that the PC operating system is being reduced to a GUI.

So may the best GUI win.

It’s quite astonishing how powerful the Apple juggernaut has become. Apple announces a new utility (Boot Camp) which allows you to load and boot Windows on the new Apples-with-an-Intel-core and it makes headlines in every US national newspaper, even winning an editorial mention one day later in the New York Times. A friend emails me to congratulate me on foreseeing this development. However, he’s misread what I said.

I think quite a few people expected the ability to boot Windows to appear from somewhere—probably some third party. Booting Windows isn’t the deal. I was being a little more precise. Apple users don’t want to keep rebooting their machines as they slip between one OS and another. They will want to run one of the OSes in a virtual machine (using the Intel virtualization capability). Such a capability for the Mac is already available from Parallels Inc for $50. It was announced a day after Boot Camp. My guess is that Leopard will go further than that—allowing you to launch Windows apps from within OS X. Apple may also add a Linux capability, just for fun. If so the release should be renamed Ocelot (OS-alot).

The official Microsoft response to Apple’s Boot Camp was predictable: “Windows is a great operating system. We’re pleased that Apple customers are excited about running it, and that Apple is responding to meet the demand.”

Yeah. That must be what’s happening here. All those Apple users are sick of the virus-free easy-to-use highly productive OS X environment, and Steve Jobs, generous to a fault, is providing them with an easy exit route. Microsoft sure has its finger on the pulse.