Joseph Cheek CEO of Lycoris has published a letter to their customers and the community. In the letter Joe addresses many outstanding issues that have gone unresolved over the past few months, and outlines major changes to Lycoris the company, the products, and future direction. My Take: I always thought that Joe is a great guy, and this letter confirms it. He is an objective and a responsible man.
Changes in Lycoris as a company
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I found this a very open and honest letter. This man is obviously someone truly commited to his product and his customers, something very rare these days. I hope that Lycoris will leave all the mentioned troubles behind.
And on a personal note: I hope that 1.5 will be beter than 1.4. 1.4 is a dissapointment for me.
It’s unfortunate that Lycoris is having problems but I’m puzzled what anyone is supposed to take from this:
1- we can’t handle physical distribution and may not be able to handle high-bandwidth charges related to virtual distribution
2- our distro is based on old, crappy code that’s hard to maintain or keep up to date
3 – we can’t afford to maintain our developers
So how can they meet the goal of an attractive first-time user product with they can’t deliver on what such a person would want: easy to get the product, product with latest features to compete with Windows/MacOS, ongoing enhancements?
I wonder what Lycoris is suppsoed to provide that Xandros and Linspire don’t already offer (and those two have funding and marketing and the more-intelligent choice of the Debian base).
Why not tag onto one of those two and provide/sell/license the Lycoris IP on top of their products or as a version of their products?
You’re absolutely right, what a swing for a company! I’m not an Lycoris user but i believe that they’re made of the right stuff and hope they’ll make it. Good luck, guys!
The three points in reference to the article are a good indication that this company is in serious trouble. How is cutting back staff, stopping pre-orders and stopping work on applications going to benefit the consumer? Seriously, they can’t even meet the demands they have now so instead of the CEO keeping things positive he lets all Lycoris customers and consumers know how bad things are with the company. If a developer such as Lycoris are continually missing deadlines and cannot service their customers properly then they should just close their doors. If I was one of the dozen consumers who purchased Lycoris only to not receive the product after two months I would be A: Demanding my money to be refunded or B: Contacting a lawyer and possibly filing a class action suit.
Lycoris isn’t stopping the pre-orders that have already been placed. They just won’t be offering pre-orders in the future. This is also the first time they’ve ever missed a deadline. The staff they are cutting back on are the the remote staff, not the people in the corporate offices. Future releases will most likely not be based on “old crappy code” either. Also, Lycoris has been around a lot longer than both Xandros and Linspire. Read the whole letter and don’t start spouting off about something until you get all the information.
of how corporations screw things up.
Why does it take them so long to come out and apologize?
My Dog Agility Club recently incorporated. Does this mean we have to start messing things up now? We sure didn’t need that status to scew up before <g>.
btw, Lycoris currently is a privately held company.
I was one of the ones whose orders were “lost” by Lycoris after they took my money in July. On enquiring about all this with Lyrcoris, I was met with either no reply or discourteous replies or censorship on their web forum when trying to discuss the matter there. It was as if I was to blame for actually demanding receipt of goods paid for months ago! Finally, thank goodness, they agreed to refund my money, though I still haven’t seen it yet.
Now Lycoris has admitted it screwed up badly and did wrong – why couldn’t they have done so a long time ago instead of treating their customers like dirt? For me, it’s not so much the fact that they screwed up as the arrogance and disregard with which they treated supporters and customers which is a problem. Now they have “come clean” we are all supposed to think they are suddenly some kind of great company? A leopard doesn’t change its spots.
My advice: don’t invest in Lycoris or its products, there are plenty of other fine Linux distributions out there whose makers are honest and decent (I personally would recommend Libranet, MEPIS or Xandros).
Well, it’s not every day that you hear a CEO from any company say that they fouled up and then actually physically tell you how they’re going to resolve it and provide you a direct contact. That’s rather old fashioned.
Our fulfilment outsourcing problem has taught us that outsourcing some parts of corporate responsibilities is not always a wise decision.
Join the club…..
I am also impressed by his frank assessment of whether their business model is viable or not. I’m not sure whether even his revised future plan will work long-term, but it’s a start.
Desktop Linux just isn’t viable beyond those people who know that they want to install it and go out and buy a box at the moment. I’m seriously impressed that some of these companies have carved out a business in the way they have over the years. The mythical corporate desktop that everyone hypes up is a total non-entity. Certainly, Suse/Novell, as an example, should simply continue to build and iteratively develop Suse Professional and look at what is required to push it forwards as part of a community. Only then, under the surface, will people see desktop Linux as a totally viable, functionally complete option in organisations, backed by companies like Lycoris and built on a solid business base. Unfortunately we still have this stupid idea from somewhere that 10,000 desktop deployments will happen tomorrow. I won’t toy with your intelligence as to where I think that somewhere is.
Arguably, desktop Linux will never be seriously ready until a group of interested parties like Suse, Lycoris, Xandros, Linspire and Trolltech get together as part of a community and ask themselves “What do we need to do make desktop Linux work and happen?” At the moment all these companies have interests that are very related, but they are trying to do their own thing as small, bit-part players and a lot of them are simply using free and open source software for what they can get away with. Unfortunately, I’m not sure whether they are ever going to understand that.
Our new server product is a mature product, built on standards-based design practices.
Everybody’s using standards-based design practices
.
Because it is based on existing products with plenty of community support, and because there is no bundled desktop to engineer, we also believe we can achieve high levels of usability and stability with SME Server while maintaining release cycles consistent with what that market expects.
I’m extremely pleased to hear that – why has it taken so long? Linux servers are a totally viable business, and if they can grow their presence for SMEs as a serious business I think they will have a solid basis. I’d call it something other than SME server though. The first thing an SME will ask is “What’s an SME?”. If there is anybody from Lycoris reading here, you have the image to do this bloody (had to get some adverb in) successfully. Use it. Seriously – I’m not joking.
Personally, I think they should concentrate most of their resources on this and grow this business seriously, at the same time benefitting the desktop side and keeping the community right with them (not like the Fedora community – just purely complementary). I just hope Lycoris and others like them learn to use the open source development community, and be a bit like Red Hat and say “Sod the intellectual property, let’s do it better than anyone else”.
I wish Lycoris, and all the Linux desktop companies out there every success. Just go out and make it damn well happen!
It was as if I was to blame for actually demanding receipt of goods paid for months ago! Finally, thank goodness, they agreed to refund my money, though I still haven’t seen it yet.
Hold them to it, write them a strongly worded e-mail at the address given and see what happens. Get a link to the ISOs and ask them for a firm date for the shipping of your box.
The fact that that they have mentioned outsourcing tells me that that is why you have been censored. Like Amazon, they have totally ballsed up their business processes as they’ve expanded and they’re going to have to sort them quickly, even if they’ve got to physically lick the stamps themselves – which is what they’re proposing and should have done to start off with.
I think Lycoris’ biggest problem is that they didn’t have a viable product. They had a product with so much potential, but sticking with KDE2 for so long was a killer blow. They probably chose the wrong distro to work with. Maybe the company behind Ubuntu could buy them out and merge in their changes into the KDE3 codebase to produce a real killer distro.
Bottom line – you have to have a product that people want to buy and is competitive.
Think its disgraceful the way Lycoris has treated their supposed customers. Their “outsourcing”, going by their forums, was the VP of sale, a Lycoris employee. Reading that statement, seems this person no longer has a job at Lycoris. Still believe we are not being told the entire truth. If it was as simple as a third party company stuffing up the ordering process, it should have been made known back in July. Any one being out spoken in their forums, complaining about the delays, lack of information and/or their orders, have simply been silenced. Avoid them.
I’ve talked with him on their NGs when they had newsgroups and it was called Redmond Linux.
He’s also a pretty good tech writer. I was saddened when he left the magazine he was writing for part-time to do this full time. Their “linux” article has never been the same since.
Even with the trying to be cheery outlook of the letter, this is anything but a cheery or positive article.
I first tried Lycoris some years back now, pretty soon after the name change I think and have to agree with someone above that the sticking with KDE2 really has hurt them. Their product was promising until KDE3 came out and they were stuck on 2.
I hope they get to the point of their up to date releases every month soon because it’s going to take that to kickstart them….
Well, my company ships thousands of routers and managing inventory became a serious problem. Right now, everything works flawlessly. This is what we did:
Build a barcode server –easy enough
Tag all your products with a barcode once you get them in.
Buy a barcode scanner, (they are very cheap) and scan in all your products. We scan into a web interface that then inserts into the db.
Then hire a competent secretary if you can (And yes, you gotta keep looking until you find someone who is really competent).
Your shipping will work flawlessly and you won’t have to spend your time managing that aspect of your company.
Maybe Rus got fired. Well, during times of change, heads may roll…
Seems he has been judging by the article.
But this is what happens when some one who is technical trying to run a business. 🙁 I like Lycoris, for a small group they have done one of the best jobs, but they are right about the Caldera thing. Tooooo old.
Also the reason why I have not gotten their OS is:
1. Not many people compile apps for Caldera (Or lycoris)
2. Iris compared to Xandros networks and Click and Run is empty.
3. They for a long time did not have a download ISO when you buy Lycoris.
4. It was stuck in place for a LONG time. Not moving forward (Which I hope will change)
I think they make one of the most useable and best looking versions of Linux out there. They just need to keep up!
Good luck!
I’m sure this is a huge rehash… but… bittorrent is your friend…
No loss if that happened. IMHO he is one of the main problems with Lycoris. His constant censoring, editing and deleting of posts about anything that had to do with users not getting their products, web pages being outdated, and other valid company complains painted a picture that Lycoris just did not care about their customers. I hope they find their footing again, but the damage done of months of stonewalling might be to great to overcome. I wish you best of luck Joe!
It was a nice letter I will give you that. And it “was” a nice product when it was try-before you buy. But in the Linux world, you have to have try before you buy, that is my rule. So I stopped buying I stopped paying attention to them, I stopped recommending them to others as one of the easiest ones to transition to from Windows. If I cant download the latest, and try it myself before telling grandma it is easy, I am going to look elsewhere. It is too ridgid and elemetary for me so I certainly wont buy it for my own use so there is no reason for me to bother.
And I dont buy the (free) live demo solution either, the live demo only gets you half way. It gives you the “this is what it looks like once you get it installed” but the fear of and problems with linux are not so much the running but the installing. If I cannot try before you buy the installer, sorry, there are other good ones out there (santa fe linux is the first that comes to mind in this category).
David
No, doesn’t look like Rus got fired – he’s still on the company page, and he answered an e-mail I wrote, he seems to still be active in the forums, too. Just looks like his job is changing. That Michael Valentine guy seems to just totally complain all the time – I read a lot of the comments he wrote that got edited. As someone just pointed out, Lycoris is a privately held company and they have the right to what sort of content goes on their site. Michael Valentine is a whining sniveler. He also is an avid Linspire user – he gave Lindows a 96% review here on OSNews!
I say bravo for Lycoris for continuing to change with the times. Hopefully this will be a positive step.
Funny, how can you read posts that were deleted, edited and censored? I also use Xandros, Libranet and Suse. I guess all the whinning and sniffling by myself and everyone else that has done the same must have registered somewhere. Take care Steve, no personal attacks from me to you.
I have had a lot of interaction with Lycoris on many levels and continue to do so. We do a lot of work with Lycoris and continue to do so. On a personal level I like Russ a lot. He is a very well intended person and he truly cares about Lycoris the company and Lycoris the community. IMHO he got over his head and had a little too much responsibility. I think Joe has basically said as much also.
People can gripe and complain about Lycoris all day long (and much would be legit), but the fact is that all of that complaining is based on deeds surrounding the 1.4 release. For the most part, Lycoris seemed to be a strong company before the 1.4 release. I think they lost their focus much earlier, but it surfaced with 1.4.
To “try before you buy”, you might want to read before you speak; Lycoris does have a downloadable version and it is not a live CD.
To Steve. If you’ve been part of the Lycoris community for long at all you’ll know that Michael Valentine and Russ just plain don’t get along. So what. From everything I’ve been able to tell from either of them, they are both decent people who happen to disagree about a subject they are passionate about.
I’m happy to see the letter from Joe, the first step in fixing anything is realizing that it is broken. He seems very sincere, and any thing that I’ve heard about Joseph Ckeek is that he is a caring and honest man. So I think questioning him or his honesty would be out of line. I think the real question is has he learned the hard business lessons, and does he have the ability to make the corrections.
I for one believes he can.
Garret
Ruffdogs
Well said Garret. I do hope things work out for them, and I wish Rus good luck with whatever he is doing. Yes we don’t see eye to eye but with the new found attitude about Customer relations that might change in the future. For now I will watch and see before I invest anymore time and money into Lycoris. I think with the changes that Joe has pledged things should start looking up fairly soon.
I don’t think that this thread was started so that people could start attacking each other. Anyway, I think Lycoris will come out of this fine. It’s a major hiccup, but things will be alright. Anyway, let’s not bash each other. Everyone has a personal preference. Be respectful. Unless you’re 12 years old, there is no excuse for patronizing people.
A different Steve
I’ve never been tempted by Lycoris Desktop/LX but was eagerly awaiting a commercial linux running on PocketPC hardware.
I’m very disappointed to see that PocketPC/LX being cancelled (delayed?).