“We are creating a new team within Haiku – a Marketing/Communications (Marcom) team. Koki is leading it. For those who don’t know him, Koki is a long time member of the BeOS community. He is fluent in Japanese, English and Spanish. He is also a professional in the realm of marketing with more than 10 years of experience. He will be responsible for website content, starting the Haiku User Groups, WalterCon, press inqueries and marketing materials.”
Good for Haiku! This is just what Haiku needs. Hopefully it will spur some developers and get us closer to a release.
Very cool. The first thing they need to do is rename “WalterCon.” Wouldn’t something like “HaikuCon” make more sense?
You could almost shorten “HaikuCon” down to HakCon since it will be a group of developers hacking away at the code to make Haiku more functional.
Why would renaming WalterCon make more sense? It’s not like people are going to search the internet for HaikuCon to see if it exists – they are going to hear about WalterCon from Haiku’s website (or related news sites) anyway.
In any case, the name WalterCon has sentimental meaning to those who have followed Haiku since the start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_The_Operating_System
Besides, we wouldn’t want a bunch of poetry buffs to show up for HaikuCon by accident.
Names mean a lot. Sentimental meaning has no bearing on market success. If I overheard two people talking about Waltercon, I wouldn’t even give it a second thought. If I overheard a couple people talking about the HaikuCon, I’d be drilling their minds to find out when/where/how/etc.
That’s why it would make more sense. Big technie news sites like slashdot/digg, when they start slapping up stories about waltercon, half the people will blaze over them without a second thought without realizing they are conventions for Haiku.
Take it as you like, but Waltercon (while I can understand sentimental value) is descriptively a bad name. The people who know the story can call it whatever they like, but PR wise it should be named appropriately.
You wonder why Haiku is so niche – the marketing has sucked/been non-existant. This is a WONDERFUL addition (with the marketing team) they are making, and sorely needed. Any changes that even have a possibility of increasing awareness/participation should be made. Including renaming a convention to something that makes sense to the 99.99999999% of people on earth who will be scratching their heads wondering wtf waltercon is even if they knew what haiku was already.
Edited 2006-08-23 01:34
Haiku is a niche, right now, for a lot of reasons. One is that we aren’t DONE yet. 😀 Even *I* don’t run it as my main desktop. It isn’t usable for a desktop yet.
The reason that marketing didn’t make sense up until now is that what we had to show wouldn’t impress. Now that we boot on most hardware, have some USB functionality, the desktop is semi-stable, etc, it makes sense to start showing things to people.
We took a very different approach to development. Most projects perfect one piece (like, say, the kernel), then move on to the next. We went bredth first, then depth, building on all of the pieces at once. It takes longer to be stable, but when you are, you are nearly done. 🙂
This genuinely excites me. More so than almost any computer news in the last…let’s just say in a long time.
Why? Because Haiku/BeOS is alive and kicking and getting closer and closer to release. What’s best is that with the right way of going about things this could truly become a real alternative to Windows.
BeOS had it right the first time, long before anyone else. This might well be a real coming of age for Haiku/BeOS.
Good luck Haiku & Co.!
Today I was telling a friend from Canada, how WinXP is still giving me griefs with hardware detection, and that an OS in 1995 had already perfected the art of harware detection and driver loading – without ever bugging the user! And when I said “that OS is BeOS” she expressed her total ignorance of it. How can such a miracolously advanced OS be so unknown?
So, Koki and the others, God bless your efforts, and keep us updated!
Edited 2006-08-22 23:08
Koki, I wish you the best on this, and if I can ever help with anything, feel free to contact me
I think you’re the right guy for the job….
I hope this helps them attract more help
There was a time when Be was starving when they could make an impression on Intel’s president Andy Grove. He was supposed to have said, I never knew the Pentium could be so fast, after all he had only ever seen Windows. A big investment followed.
Now we are entering the time when most PCs by years end will be dual core, and mostly still running Windows which today still doesn’t shine on multicores above a minimal degree.
It would be realy nice if Haiku could reshow the charm it has over multiple cores, but with what apps?
I would also go with HaikuCon.
I truly loved BeOS. I have a 4.5 manual sitting here on my desk, for some reason. But as much as it was decried, Be’s narrow “focus shift” to Internet appliances still makes perfect sense, even though Be Inc. flubbed it.
Face it: as a general, all-purpose desktop, Haiku is just never going to be worth anyone’s time, unless you’re a hobbyist.
But given a core set of functions and a good reference machine, Haiku could very well find a place. Think of any sci-fi movie where the wall has a large flat-screen display with broadcast news. And then the computer announces an incoming video call. Or a calendar reminder. You never see shelves of shrink-wrapped Family Tree Maker or QuickBooks boxes laying around. That stuff can be delivered online now.
Thinking of core requirements for such a future device, my requirements are small indeed: media (tv, dvd, cd, etc.,), analog phone/fax and VOIP softphone, video teleconferencing, web browser (flash included), email and PIM. That would be do-able.
Being a whizbang 32-bit OS (now that 32-bit is passe) isn’t enough. Being the “media OS” copy (now five years later and the Media Kit is still Alpha) isn’t enough. Having a smaller, refined focus shift might spur activity. I’d be MUCH more inclined to help work on 10 core apps for a device I’d hope to get my parents/grandparents/wife than a floundering hobbyist be-all.
I don’t agree, particularly with your premise that a general, all-purpose desktop is an unreachable goal, but I find the rest of what you have to say very interesting. 🙂
I think building a media center from Haiku is a great idea. I have wanted one for a long time. The OS has to be written first, though. The OS is almost designed for that sort of thing. Now that we are far enough along, I would love to see someone start a project that focuses on PIM, for example. Or analog phone/fax.
Right now, we are focused on networking, kernel improvements (for stability and POSIX compliance) and bug fixing in the UI. All of those would be necessary for this media center.
Feel free to email me about this – I would like to talk more…
Koki, I wish you the best on your new mission. Please let me know if there is anything that I can help with. You know my e-mail and IM address. Feel free to contact me
Why don’t you reply to Jorge, directly, so he actually reads it? We need every help we can get and it’s time to start the marketing machine.
I’m glad you think it’s time to kick it off. Last time I checked Haiku wanted to stay low to avoid people testing alpha quality code and getting the wrong impressions.
Well, it’s still too early for an official alpha release, but we can at least attract more developers. Also, we have to prepare for the official alpha release.
Edited 2006-08-23 11:33
A good first thing to do would be updating the ‘Our Status’ page/graph, and keeping it up to date: easy and effective.
How about a whole new website instead? That is already in the works, and should solve your needs.
Information people there to buy or download Haiku.
I´ve been looking around their website, and I may just be blind, but I can’t seem to find any info on there to actually get Haiku.
No, you’re not blind
Keep in mind that Haiku is PRE ALPHA (barely even usable). It is not suitable for end-users (as mphipps points out above). It can however be tested using various methods, and for now, the best source of public information on how to “download” Haiku is here:
http://www.haiku-os.org/wiki/index.php?title=Getting_Haiku
Right now, Haiku needs developers and (brave) testers more than anything.
There is no official download yet because the OS is not done. The project management has chosen not to do pre-alpha releases because otherwise lots of potential users would be scared off by a non-working product. Even with this new MarCom team, I think they should still not target end users, at the very least until the networking stack is done. I hope they first focus on attracting developers and preparing the marketing machine behind closed doors.
For the adventurous ones, there are at least a couple of sources of disk images built from the live source tree every 6 hours or so. Search the forums.
DRIVERS !
You have to have X-windows or there is no shot for survival.
X-Windows is *NOT* a requirement for survival. Windows doesn’t do it natively (as part of the OS), and I’d bet a small fraction of Windows users even *know* about X-Windows, let alone use it. Mac OS X doesn’t use X-Windows, either, and it seems to be doing just fine.
BeOS/Zeta/Haiku have their own native GUI system that goes from the drivers in the kernel and userspace up to a full windowing system, and X-Windows isn’t even an issue.
A common logical argument (and this one makes far more sense than your assertion that it must have X-windows or there is no shot for survival) is that since it is FOSS, it will survive, because there’s no business to go broke and abandon it. Maybe sometime in the future, Haiku will whither into the history books as a niche OS. Then again, that same fate may also happen to Linux, because time and technology march forward, and there’s always a point where backwards compatibility becomes too heavy of a burden to carry forward. Perhaps in another 10 years Linux won’t even be source-compatible with many applications that you can build and run on it now, even those that are console applications that run in userspace.
Now, the one thing Haiku definitely needs is the only thing you said that is without debate: DRIVERS! No OS is useful if you can’t boot it and use it on hardware, though even that is changing somewhat with VMWare, Parallels and VPC, though none of those is as nice as running directly on the hardware without that slowing it down.
Yes, you will need drivers.
But why would Haiku need X-windows?