Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Stars of the original Mac development team try to solve one of the hottest puzzles in technology today: How to make the Linux desktop user-friendly.
Feb 24, 2000 | Across from a small sea of cubicles in a Palo Alto office, a photographer tries to corral the Eazel executive team into a makeshift conference room for a press photo. CEO Mike Boich is late; he's busy working on a second round of financing. The company logo is ready -- a yellow "Eaze" with a teal "l" -- but there are still no company shirts, so Andy Hertzfeld strolls over promoting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on his T-shirt. Bart Decrem and Stan Christensen are polishing off a late lunch on the last weekday before the company's official launch.
It's an enticingly chaotic scene that the Eazel founders have acted out before -- several as seminal members of the original Apple Macintosh development team. This time around, these ace programmers and business folks are set on a new "Let's change the world" course: to build a user-friendly desktop for Linux-based operating systems and to make managing the notoriously tricky Linux a breeze.
With just $1 million in seed funding, they've certainly lined up a talented crew: Hertzfeld, Eazel's "software wizard," designed a significant chunk of the original Mac OS; Boich set up Apple's software evangelism group before founding Radius, a graphics-for-Macs hardware and software firm; Susan Kare, Eazel's interface graphic designer, created the original Mac icons; Guy "Bud" Tribble, vice president of software engineering, is a programming force who was the manager of the early Mac team, a Java architect and, until recently, CTO of Sun-Netscape Alliance. But for all its gifted geeks, Eazel faces challenges that have long flummoxed Linux interface designers: maintaining the power and flexibility that is Linux's hallmark while making it easy to use for newbies.
It has long been a dream of the Unix/Linux community to have a desktop as easy to use as the Macintosh or Windows platform. And there have been scores of aspirants, including at least two -- the K desktop environment, or KDE, and GNOME -- directly aimed at Linux. So, there's no guarantee of success. But the Eazel team, which will be working with the already established GNOME project, is so studded with talent that it must be given a close watch.
The Eazel desktop is only one part of the strategy, however. While the desktop will be free software, with the source code available to all comers, Eazel has a two-pronged plan that includes not only providing a friendly interface for mainstream computer users, but also making a business out of facilitating easy software installation and automatic updates of the rapidly evolving operating system and the applications that run on it. Its business model is to offer these services on a subscription basis, says Christensen, general manager of online services.
"Right now, to do system management [for Linux] requires a pretty intimate knowledge of how the software is constructed," says Hertzfeld, whose beaming round face, spectacles and disheveled brown hair lend him the magical charm of an overgrown hobbit. "You need to know about various system components -- a user of a word processor needs to know what graphics library or string library they have. Someone who just wants to upgrade their word processor needs to understand a lot of technical detail."
Get Salon in your mailbox!