Clickstream

SCO's Development Roadmap to Nowhere

I don't know why SCO is bothering with announcements at the SCO Forum about their new product roadmap. I've seen the same press release in three different trade rags touting their "refurbishing", as their CEO puts it, of Unix. After alienating the entire industry and much of their potential future customer base, they think a roadmap for Unix development will attract new customers?

I doubt anyone could be that stupid, which is why this sounds a lot like trying to keep up the appearance of being a real business in order to keep the stock up and to prop up a weak legal offense. Consider the large number of ex-SCO developers out there. It's kind of hard to develop an operating system without people to do the work, and more are leaving every day because SCO has become a resume stain nobody with any smarts wants to be associated with.

Consider also the number of ISVs leaving the SCO fold versus those moving toward SCO. Fewer ISVs means fewer applications ported, which means less viability as a server platform, which means fewer customers, which means the OS is a dead end.

Imagine if SCO were to magically win their lawsuits: what company would turn to SCO for software when they've already showed that they have no qualms about suing their customer base? This would be a boon to Unix vendors who are hurting now because Linux and Windows on Intel boxes have been eating their sales from the bottom, which is unfortunately where the volume comes from to sustain their chip development if they don't use Intel/compatible chips.

And then there's all that stock that is being dumped by the executives. Every quarterly filing reveals the massive cashing-in that's going on. Makes one wonder when the SEC will start investigating...

Posted by Mark Friday, September 05, 2003 10:14:00 PM | permalink |