There was a period where watching Linux distributions come and go was both head-spinning and melancholy. The roll call of failed Linux companies is long, and it includes everyone from true believers who just couldn't make it through tough times to opportunists and last-gasp outfits that thought the mere hype power of Linux alone would save them.
When we tick off the real commercial survivors of the past five years, we include Red Hat and SUSE, we usually note that TurboLinux is alive and kicking in the Asia-Pacific region, we point out that Conectiva remains in South America, we might think to name Progeny as a concern that continues, and we'll probably say "oh, yeah, and Mandrake."
We'll confess: We've never been fans of Mandrake for more than a day or two. The distribution from France-based Mandrakesoft was originally built on the premise that what Linux enthusiasts really needed was Red Hat, only with more themes, less tested packages, and indiscriminate application of Pentium compiling optimizations that always provoked coos of "snappier" performance despite a steady trickle of evidence that sometimes — surprise, you can optimize an application too much and make it not only less stable, but even slower.
Our issues with the distribution were pretty minor compared to other problems. Mandrake had terrible luck establishing stable distribution channels in the United States. The company entered into ill-fated deals with publishing companies trying to get into the Linux boom. It attempted shrinkwrap sales in places like Walmart, not on the back of cheap PCs (which we see more of lately) but as a stand-alone product that wouldn't run a single program with which it shared shelf space, whether it be Quicken or Big Bass Fishin'.
So when Mandrake found itself unable to trade on major stock exchanges a few years back and then entered bankruptcy in the face of a narrowing Linux shrinkwrap market, we really didn't think much of it: We'd been waiting for Mandrake to flop for years. We don't think we wrote that anywhere though, so we won't be retracting the sentiment. We will, however, note that the company has perhaps turned its fortunes around by keeping its desktop shrinkwrap concerns going while also managing to build relationships with government agencies that have turned it into a solid niche player in the enterprise space.
The company's latest financials are still modest, with a Tuesday revenue announcement of €5.18 million (about $6.7 million), but that represents a 33 percent increase in the past year, and that kind of business is the real indicator of a change in the company's fortunes.
In the past year, Mandrake landed government contracts (one to replace 1,500 Windows NT servers in the French Ministry of Equipment; the other to participate in a French Ministry of Defense secure Linux project), and it has begun to make sales in developing nations in Africa with the sort of low-cost product we first noted from it back in June.
We'll make another confession, for those too lazy to follow that link: At the time we said, "we're fairly sure this is not an offering that will set the world on fire: It depends on a very narrow class of customers with desperately decrepit computing hardware for it to make more sense than a simple stand-alone desktop play from the likes of Sun."
Evidently, the world doesn't need to be on fire for Mandrake to finally see a reversal of its fortunes.
Update: Novell's Desktop Finally Happens
We've been waiting around for Novell to finally ship its desktop product, and on Monday, it did. The product is priced at $50, which includes a year of updates (and which makes it competitive with Sun's own Linux-based desktop product).
Among the enhancements Novell introduces to the already solid SUSE distribution are improvements to OpenOffice's support of Microsoft macros (something we've kvetched about in the past), integration between Ximian Evolution's address book and OpenOffice (for mailmerges), and integration with Novell's ZenWorks (for workstation management). It also provides (as expected) SUSE's YAST installation/configuration tool.
All in all, it isn't a surprising or revolutionary release, and Novell isn't out to oversell it or raise undue expectations. As CEO Jack Messman said in a statement:
"Novell Linux Desktop is not about the wholesale replacement of your Windows systems, but rather it's about identifying where and when an open source desktop can be a sensible, cost-effective alternative."
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