Riding a Dead Horse

Seems like also Magnussoft found out that they were riding a dead horse. I stopped using ZETA more or less a year ago, but was following the development to January this year. I don’t know if there was a fight between Bernd Korz and Magnussoft, and I am rather thinking that Magnussoft didn’t get anything back on the money they invested in ZETA.

There is no place for ZETA in the ongoing OS war (Haiku included). There is only space for the three big ones, Windows, MacOS X and Linux. You need millions of dollars to be able to compete with something that is free. Let us face it, the free Ubuntu gives the users more. ZETA 1,5 with burning software, costs you 150 euros and gives you less! Only thinking economicly about it, you should get paid for using ZETA and not pay for it. Is it fair to say it, or even think it? Sure it is! ZETA is being sold as a complete solution, a Windows replacement. Everbody that is sane, knows that this is not true. If you look isolated on the price of MacOS X, you will find that it is a bit cheaper, but far more complete and up to date when it comes to what you today are expecting to be able to do with your computer.

In fact, the OS war appears to be over for me. The market pie is still getting bigger, and Windows is more or less maintaining it’s position. Rumours tell that Apple is getting 9.000 first-time Mac buyers a day! Something that is making the Switch campain a great success. Linux is now getting it’s deserved attention. Dell is currently running a survey of what Linux distro to support, HP reporting that companies are buying thousands of machines with Linux preinstalled and France reporting that their parlament members will be getting laptops with Ubuntu. ZETA is getting far to much attention over at OSNews, nobody else are mentioning ZETA. Then again, OSNews has always had a focus on alternative OSes and it is fun to read about alternative operating systems. But please repeat after me: “ZETA is a Hobby-OS, in the same way as ReactOS, SkyOS and Haiku”. It is one of the best OSes to start learning C++ development. It has a lot of great ideas, and most of them are now also included in other operating systems. The BeOS platform has been dying for 6-7 years already, and this process will continue. Go ahead and ride that dead horse, it is great fun, but have in mind that you are getting no where!!!

Update – March 26

Today, Magnussoft publicly commented why they are pulling out of ZETA-OS:

Die dabei erzielten Verkaufszahlen lagen jedoch massiv unter den Erwartungen von magnussoft Deutschland.

For those who don’t understand German, the sales figures were massively under what magnussoft Deutschland expected. Just about what I wrote above. So, I was sadly right. It will be difficult to do a commercial distro with the BeOS platform (Haiku/ZETA) in the future. A massive, long term investment is needed, something nobody seems to be willing to do!

This entry was posted by frankps on March 24, 2007 at 08:33, and is filed under BeOS/Haiku, Operating Systems. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0.You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

Comments (8)
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#1 written by emwe 4 years ago

As ususal a nice read Frank! Nothing more to say. Have a nice weekend

Michael

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#2 written by frankps 4 years ago

Thank you Michael, read your article about it too!

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#3 written by koki 4 years ago

Interesting piece Frank.

In one of our latest chats on MSN, you mentioned that you had a lot of interest in Haiku, more now than ever before (something along those lines). I meant to ask you why the interest now, but never had a chance. Would you care to expand? I am just curious.

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#4 written by frankps 4 years ago

Hi Jorge, nice seeing you commenting here.

I liked the last development on Haiku, but my interest for Haiku is just a little bit more then ZETA. I guess I will not be installing it, other then under Vmware Player. Haiku is just fun, and nothing that I will be able to work with for many years, if ever…

Having changes in work since last time we chatted (something I hope we will continue with), I will not have time for such a project. My work load has increased a lot, so much that I will not be able to finish my management classes this spring, only next autumn.

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#5 written by koki 4 years ago

Hi Frank.

Yes, it’s going to be a while before you can do anything productive under a stable system with Haiku. But I would not underestimate Haiku’s future potential. It may not compete in what you define as the OS wars, or at least not in the foreseeable future. But that does not mean that it cannot gain a considerable user base sometime down the line.

BTW, I use Ubuntu on my laptop, and I can’t say that I don’t like it. But I still miss the snappiness, simplicity and the many little details and subtleties that made BeOS such a pleasure to use.

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#6 written by frankps 4 years ago

Hi again Jorge,

the Haiku team seems to lack motivation again, or at least there is a few updates on the source tree (it might also mean that they are working on something big that will first be uploaded when finished). It’s been a bit to quiet from them again.

Ubuntu is good and fast enough for most people, just not for us that have tried BeOS… But also BeOS would be a bit slower if it was more complete.

I love MacOS X for it’s speed and similar implementation of queries.

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#7 written by koki 4 years ago

Howdy Frank.

I am not so sure that Haiku development pace has slowed down. There seem to be waves of activity, but overall I am under the impression that it is in the upswing, and I thought there has been some interesting commits in the last few months (although I have no statistics to support my perception).

I have been intrigued by MacOS X for a while, but the perception that I had from playing with it in stores several times is that it is sluggish; but you are right: it may be because I use to BeOS as the measuring stick. Nevertheless, I am turned off by single source purchases in general, so I don’t see myself purchasing a Mac myself.

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#8 written by koki 4 years ago

On your update regarding the announcement from magnussoft.

ZETA has been doomed from the time of yellowTAB; I always thought that shutting down yellowTAB and moving on to magnussoft did not make, from a product viability POV, any difference at all: the same problems that made ZETA commercially inviable then (license fees, high price, poor product management, lack of adequate funding, poor marketing, etc.) still exist today. Different company, different development team, and slightly modified product name, but same old problems.

Haiku is in a different league, though, as there is a fundamental difference with ZETA: it is open source. So, on the one hand, there are no sales goals, no profits targets to meet, no senior management or investors to please. On the other, Haiku benefits from willing contributors that submit code to scratch their itch (I always wanted to use that phrase!), and chances are that the number of these contributors will grow in the future; not something that will ever happen with a closed source OS like ZETA, unless somebody is willing to put a few million on the table (very unlikely).

So, while ZETA is doomed, Haiku has potential IMHO; not that it will succeed no matter what, but the potential is definitely there. Oh, and the business friendly MIT license is also a plus.

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