| Revenge of the UNIX Nerds: McBride Shoots, Will He Score? |
by Malcolm Dean (August 27, 2002)
DesktopLinux.com contributing editor Malcolm Dean examines the reemergence of Caldera under new leadership and brand name -- The SCO Group. Unveiled at the GeoForum in Las Vegas, the company's new focus positions it to make an impact on the business desktop in a big way . . .
Revenge of the UNIX Nerds: McBride Shoots, Will He Score?
Malcolm Dean
Las Vegas -- Caldera is at an end. Caldera is at a beginning. It is the bet of the times. It is the gamble du jour. It is the age of the Wise Choice. It is the epoch of Folly. We have everything before us. We have nothing before us. In short, the present is now so much like the past that some of its noisiest authorities insist on its being received, for good or for evil, only in superlatives.
Like Dickens' Tale of Two Cities, this is a story of individuals swept up by history. It's the story of an Operating System born decades ago in Bell Laboratories, and an Operating System born just a few years ago on a student's PC. It's the story of an 'acien reseller regime', with its landed nobility, and a restless population hungry for desktop bread instead of proprietary eye candy.
It is the story of a company born deep within Novell, a giant which ignored first the rise of Windows, then the rise of Linux, while in its executive corridors and on the street, the voices calling for a revolution began in whispers, and ended in a riot of Linux distributions.
One of the first Novellers to notice Linux was Darl McBride,then general manager of Novell's Embedded Systems Division. His colleague at the time, Ransom Love, later brought Caldera to the revolutionary ramparts as the first widely recognized desktop-oriented distribution with an advanced installer. Recognizing that despite its rapid evolution, Linux was not ready to become an enterprise operating system, Love last year merged Caldera's Linux with SCO's UNIX OSes, yielding a company with enormous expertise and a serious identity problem.
Like Novell, SCO is a company with Intellectual Property and a heritage extending back to the dawn of UNIX and networked computing. Like Novell, it is a company with a reputation which reflects that past, but neither its present nor its future. Mention Novell, and most people still think of NetWare 3. Mention SCO, and if they have heard the name, most people think of an old UNIX company.
Part of Caldera behaved as if that were true. At last year's Forum, an annual event for SCO re-sellers and consultants, a battle of slide slows erupted, in which the former SCO employees showed graphs illustrating how Linux failed at a certain threshold, while SCO's UNIXes kept ticking. To these UNIX veterans, the sudden success of the upstart OS was ridiculous. But caught up in the irrational exuberance of the Dot Com scams, Caldera and everyone else could practically taste revolutionary victory. To them, giving UNIX Linux personality modules and absorbing 'les systemes anciens' was clearly the goal.
A year later, given the current economy, the War on Terrible OSes has not gone well. There have been many casualties at the ramparts, many dead among the Distributions.
Unseen by the outside world, SCO's customer base just kept going, and going, and going. Despite Caldera's vigorous efforts to guillotine the SCO brand, revolutionary fervor was not contagious. While Caldera Linux was losing three dollars for every dollar earned, SCO's UNIXes were making a profit. Safely flourishing in several vertical markets (MacDonalds, NASDAQ), they have a loyal customer base and active consulting community.
Once his work to establish UnitedLinux was done, Ransom Love closed the circle by announcing his successor, Darl McBride (see Novell, Missed Opportunties). McBride has lost no time in taking a hard look at the company's assets. The result is that voices long calling for a revived emphasis on SCO products have won the day.
Just as Borland earned a standing ovation from its community for dumping Inprise, the meaningless monicker which cost $2 million, SCO's community came to its feet when McBride told them that SCO is back, and bigger. Dressed in a Harley jacket, black jeans and wraparound sunglasses, he compared the new SCO Group's strategy to the same formula which brought the American motorcycles back to world renown.
SCO's revived relationship with its users assures them that its UNIXes will receive regular updates. But McBride's slides dropped the name 'Caldera Linux' for SCO Linux, a point which clearly caused confusion among the Caldera/SCO executive ranks. Some executives were clearly under the impression that the Caldera name would be retained, and others were convinced that SCO would soon return to the desktop in a big way.
The result is that while the SCO name has been retained to benefit from the heritage and solid reputation of its products, the Caldera brand has been damaged, if not dumped.Caldera Linux was the first widely recognized distribution with a friendly, intelligent installer, the first to gain acceptance as a business desktop.
To the outside world, SCO Group now presents a collection of unknown brands, including 'SCO Linux' and 'UnitedLinux'.
Ironically, some Caldera products are now sufficiently mature to displace Microsoft Back Office. Volution Manager provides administrative capabilities across all Linux distributions and SCO UNIXes. It also comes with a licensed version of Novell eDirectory (see Novell, Missed Opportunities). Volution Messaging Server is making its reputation replacing Exchange Servers in UNIX and Linux environments. Consulting businesses are gathering around both products as governments and small businesses begin to realize there are alternatives to hefty Microsoft license fees.
McBride should throw out the meaningless Volution brand name, presenting the world with a clear set of Caldera Linux products and SCO UNIX products.
Looking behind the name game, SCO Group has revived its efforts to update its entire line of software and the related, unofficial freeware library, Skunkware. SCO has shipped a contingent of engineers to Germany, where they are working on the first release of UnitedLinux, an enterprise-certified server OS.
UnitedLinux has received much unjustified criticism in the media, but it is the clear wish of major industry players such as IBM and H-P that they have two certified versions of Linux to deal with, no more, and no fewer. The reasons are obvious. They dread the possibility of one Linux distribution achieving the monopoly status of Windows, yet they find the profusion of uncertified distributions expensive and counterproductive. Red Hat and UnitedLinux are the preferred solution.
An interesting project benefitting from UnitedLinux is SCO's Smallfoot, a technology which quickly creates configurations for small dedicated devices like game boxes and sales terminals. Smallfoot could easily be configured with lightweight applications to give new life to old laptops and PCs in Third World countries or in the education market.
Opinder Bawa, SCO's Sr. Vice President, Technology, agrees that SCO must now plan a return to the Linux desktop. Neither IBM nor H-P is pressing clients to migrate from Windows, satisfied at this point to see steady growth in Linux server sales, and leaving the dirty work to small players such as Mandrake, Lycoris, and LindowsOS. Judith Chavis, H-P's abrasive Director of Linux Marketing and Business Development, said H-P would make no commitment to the desktop until a major client stood up and demanded it. She went on to add that she wouldn't even spend the time necessary to teach her child to use StarOffice.
Tomorrow: Malcolm Dean's interview with Darl McBride, SCO Group's CEO.
Copyright © 2002 by Malcolm Dean. Reproduced by DesktopLinux.com with permission.
About the author: Contributing Editor Malcolm Dean is a writer and IT strategist based in Los Angeles.
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