Last spring, I was frustrated, because it seemed like many Mac users were not aware of CrossOver Mac.  CrossOver is so much faster and easier to try than any of the other alternatives, it seems a crime to me that every Mac user doesn't try it first.  It's not always the perfect solution, but when it works, it is very sweet.

However, since we believe in Free Software, and provide all of our core work to the free Wine Project, we're not exactly rolling in the marketing dough.  So we had lunch with our PR firm to see what we could do with a bit of creativity.  We had a lot of ideas, and this scheme of doing a Lameduck Challenge came up just as I had to leave the meeting.  The idea was we'd give our software away for free if George Bush could accomplish any of a range of fairly challenging goals.
I circle back later, and discover that our COO and Republican VP of Sales has decided it's a winner, and we're going ahead with it.  I had some reservations; I love to make light hearted jokes, but I was not interested in denigrating the office of the President or in offending a lot of Republicans.  But after being reassured that a survey of Republicans and Independents did not turn up anyone deeply offended, we pressed ahead.

We announced it with great fanfare...and watched it sink into nowhere.  No pickup, no interest, no buzz; a marketing gimmick that no one cared about.
We did some follow up work on it, had some fun with it, but again, we got little or no interest.

And then we had the financial market meltdown.  Followed by the radical tightening of belts everywhere and plummeting gas prices.  Suddenly what had seemed improbable happened - gas cost less now than it did a year ago.

Now we had a choice - no one but a few people had noticed (see 'sunk like a stone', above). We could just pretend it never happened.

But what the heck, a promise is a promise.  Besides, no one cared with the first round, so who was going to pay attention this time?  We'd give away 10,000 copies maybe, 50,000 tops.

Oh, how wrong we were.

I think that Andrew Lavallee expressed it best in his post on it:  CodeWeavers is learning what happens when you scream “Free Software” in a crowded Internet.

So we announced it on Monday, October 27th.  We had tested out our system for giving away the software the previous week; we have a rich experience that went through the whole process, got the customer an account and a support entitlement, the whole nine yards.  Late Monday night we cut over live to giving away the software, just to shake out the bugs.  (It was supposed to start at midnight, Central Time, we actually cut over at about 10:00 pm, 2 hours early).

Our first sign of trouble was that the server load shot up through the roof right then on Monday night.  It would not recover for several days.  Jeremy Newman worked with it that entire night; we kept tuning and optimizing the whole way, pruning parts of our rich experience down.  Each time we'd handle a new jump in the load, we'd get slammed even harder.  What was fantastic about it was that the traffic was coming from all over - we were reaching people all across the world, in all different walks of life.

I woke up at 6:30 and checked in with Jer, just as things started to really head south.  The last straw came when both Slashdot and Digg picked up on the story; our server simply could not keep up.  All of our tuning and trimming and slimming down to a bare bones rich web site just wasn't getting it done.

Now here is where being a small nimble company is extremely gratifying.  We had been from plan A to plan B through plan C.  Jeremy Newman had been up all night working different approaches.  And he still had enough gas in him to execute 'plan N', which was an utterly bare bones CGI page that took your email, slapped it into a flat file, and gave you a download and did nothing else.  Our site went down hard at about 8:30; by about 9:15, it was back up and running smoothly, handling every single request that came in.  The web site hummed along all of the rest of that day, the 28th, the day we had promised to give our software away for free. 

By the end of the day, we gave away 650,000 copies of our software.  We believe that is the largest give away of its kind in the world, ever.  It was much more of a challenge than we expected, but I feel very proud of our team and Jeremy Newman in particular; he made sure that we were able to fundamentally honor our promise, despite the unexpected and overwhelming demand.  I also should put in a good word for our bandwidth provider, Panther Express; they deserve a great deal credit for the files being delivered.

And, I believe, we reached more people in one day than we had ever reached before, and we have exposed a lot of people to the goodness that is CrossOver.  I am very pleased with that result.  650,000 people tried our software in one day (in typically takes us about a year to serve that many trial downloads); we more than doubled our customer base.

Of course, the jury is still out on what it's going to cost us; our online single copy sales have been down about 25% since the challenge.  It's not clear if thats the economy, the lack of a new version (we're working on it, really!), or the Lame Duck challenge.  It's probably a mix of all three, but probably the largest factor is the Challenge.  Even so, I'm very happy with the result - the more people know about CrossOver, the better.

One other great thing is that we were contacted and thanked by people from all over the world.  A lot of people gained an appreciation for what we're trying to do; the fact that we represent a Microsoft Free way to run Windows applications; the fact that we work with a broader community to provide freedom to our customers.

Now if only people would stop writing in and saying "Gee, I missed the Lame Duck challenge, do you think you could...."

(7 Comments)

So in a CodeWeavers management meeting one day, we were looking for a way to show off Wine's new maturity, particularly for porting applications.  What we needed was a freely redistributable application; one that didn't exist on Mac or Linux, but one that was readily understandable.  We thought about Firefox; that was perfect, but sadly, there were Mac and Linux builds.

And then a little bird flew in the Window and chirped 'Chromium', and we knew we had it.

So on Thursday, September 4th, I called a company Fire Drill.  I said I wanted to ship ported versions of Chromium for Mac and Linux, and I wanted to do it as fast as possible.  By Friday, we had a first working build.  But it had a major problem - you couldn't do https sites, so logging in to Gmail, for example, was right out.   Unfortunately, supporting that required that we finish the implementation of a nearly brand new DLL in Wine - the winhttp dll.  Luckily for us, Hans Leiddeker had recently joined CodeWeavers, and in a bit of a hazing ritual, we asked him to scramble madly to implement what we needed.  A little more than a week later, and he had done it.  Of course, there were many other people who pitched in and tuned Wine to make Chromium just that much nicer.

So today I am pleased to announce that we have shipped freely available versions of Chromium for both the Mac and Linux.  Not only does this give Mac and Linux users a chance to see what all the hype is about, it also lets the world see just how far Wine has come and how powerful it truly can be.  In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux.  Imagine what we can do for you.

Frankly, it's events like this that remind me just what a joy it is to work with everyone at CodeWeavers, and with the broader Wine community.  One of the greatest joys in life is to do meaningful work, and to get to do it with such fantastic people is an added bonus.  I'm looking forward to our annual party in a few weeks.

Cheers,

Jeremy

(0 Comments)

I thought I'd take some time to update our road map and lay out our plans.

Today we've shipped CrossOver Games 7.1, which fixes a lot of niggling bugs in a variety of games.  Our game team is going great guns, and I think that 2008 will see some steady gains with games.  We hope to improve on City of Heroes/Villains, get proper Lord of the Rings Online Support in place, and just generally broaden the range of games that play well with CrossOver.  The LOTRO support is particularly critical, as my wife and I just started pla...er...testing together.

For regular CrossOver, we're likely to ship another bug fix release for regular CrossOver as well, as we've got a number of issues with Office 2007, particularly Outlook, we're ironing out.  We may do incremental 7.x releases all through 2008, as there is quite a bit to shake out. The Microsoft Office products are always harder, by at least a factor of 10, than any other Windows application we support.

After that, we're going to continue some major work we've been doing; I hope we can bring some or all of this to fruition in 2008.  This includes some work on the DIB Engine and gdiplus; both are core technologies that we hope will help dramatically improve performance and compatibility, particularly with some very recent software releases.  We also hope to have better support for .NET, which should allow us to expand our application reach to modern versions of Quickbooks, along with a range of other applications.  We're also hoping to refresh the Linux GUI.  Other folks have been doing some hard work on iTunes; we're hoping to capitalize and improve on that, and I still crave the NetFlix viewer on my MythTV box.  And, of course, we constantly strive to improve Wine so that everything will just 'work better'.

We're also looking to have some fun this summer and fall; look for an announcement from us next week.

Cheers,

Jeremy

(0 Comments)

Hello,

In the past weeks we have been working hard on getting CrossOver 7.0 out the door and help on the Wine 1.0 release. Now that both are released, we are are continuing our work on CrossOver Games.

Today we have released a new unsupported build, and we are heading towards a new supported build.

In the next days we plan to fix the HTML and Guild Wars bugs remaining in the unsupported build, and then start a beta test for a new supported build. This new build will not have support for new games, but it will have some bugfixes and code based on Wine 1.0 and potentially run unsupported applications better.

Once this is done, we will turn our effort towards supporting more applications. So if you have not done so already, please vote for your games in our application database, since your votes and advocate activities are our main guidelines when deciding for new applications. We are considering Lord of the Rings Online since there is a lot of activity on this game and our .NET work is going forward. The currently top voted unsupported game is City of Heroes, so we want to look into this as well. Beyond that I want to take a new look at new high end games like Call of Duty 4, Age of Conan and dxlevel 95 support in Half Life 2 based games to get a new idea about the current state of the Mac graphics drivers. I cannot promise at this point that we will get all this going, but that is certainly the direction we are going to go.

Have fun,
Stefan

(7 Comments)

Today marks a major milestone for me, personally, for CodeWeavers, and for the Wine project.

Not only did we ship CrossOver 7, our best CrossOver yet, but we, together with the rest of the Wine community, shipped Wine 1.0 today.

Wine 1.0 has been 15 years in the making, and includes 9 of the hardest years I've ever worked in my life. When I became involved with Wine and Free Software in 1999, the concept that you could successfully give away your work and still stay in business was foreign; Open Source business models were laughed at, Linux was unknown, and everyone was just waiting for Apple to die. Using an operating system not made in Redmond was considered ridiculous.

Today Apple is reinvigorated, Linux is flourishing, and Open Source business models are everywhere; in fact, very few startup technology companies are not Open Source companies in some way.

And, most importantly to me, our quest to see a stable, highly functional and usable version of Wine is complete. Wine 1.0 is certainly not perfect, and thus neither is CrossOver 7, but they both offer a real opportunity to use Windows programs on Macintosh or Linux system in a seamless way. This means that we have worked, in our way, to eliminate that applications barrier to entry, and allowed people to enjoy an alternate operating system of their choosing.

I am very grateful to the many people that have supported our work, from our customers, to our fellow Wine developers.

But now I'm going to go celebrate. It's rare that you have a chance to celebrate a milestone such as this, and I do not want to miss it.

But tomorrow we'll get back on track to continue to improve Wine so that we can continue to strive to make every application work perfectly.

Cheers,

Jeremy

(8 Comments)

(With apologies to Paul Masson)

We have had a long struggle this spring, and now into summer. We've been working hard to make Wine, and therefore CrossOver, run Microsoft Office 2007, particularly Outlook. I had hoped that we would have this working much earlier in the year. The signs were promising; we had the installation issues figured out and early runs were very encouraging.

Unfortunately, reality has been crashing down hard lately. This last weekend was particularly rough. We had done a large round of internal testing, and were feeling pretty good. We built a release candidate to share with a group of private testers, thinking that if all went well, we could ship this week. I then went camping with my family (and we had a great weekend camping). Sadly, on Sunday, I came back, only to find nothing but negative beta reports; failure after failure. And to make matters worse, we had 4 ticks that had hidden in our stuff and chose to come out only on Sunday night after we'd unpacked.

But the bottom line is that we can't ship until we feel confident that it will work well across a broad range of scenarios, not just on our desks with our versions of Office.

So we had to regroup this weekend. I think we've now come to understand that certain non US versions of Office, and Enterprise editions, have some issues (and they're challenging for us, as they're not easy for us to buy). So hopefully we'll be able to get CrossOver 7 shipped here shortly. And then as soon as we do that, we're going to turn around and push out another release of CrossOver Games; we've got some fixes in the pipeline there.

Of course, our own struggles reflect those of Wine itself. We are eagerly looking forward to the upcoming release of Wine 1.0, after 15 long hard years of work. We look forward to providing a stable and polished way to use Wine 1.0 in CrossOver, as well as doing the work to bring Wine to 2.0 and beyond.

And now my family and I are off to Yellowstone. We're not camping, so hopefully the ticks won't get us...

Cheers,

Jeremy

(0 Comments)

We go through our days looking for meaning and purpose to our lives, and I think I've found just that in playing Team Fortress 2.  While I am getting better almost daily, I have found several life lessons from killing (and being killed) in the course of hours (and hours) of gameplay.  I thought I'd share a few of the more poignant lessons.

10)  Rushing into any situation with guns blazing and little forethought only leads to a quick and painful death.
9)  Having great focus (Sniper) without any direction or goals is meaningless.
8)  Being the fastest (Scout) or the strongest (Heavy) isn't nearly as effective as being prepared.
7)  You can heal (Medic) the pain of others, but you're not very effective if you do so at your own expense.
6)  You can successfully build (Engineer) almost anything, but you should always have a contingency plan for when things blow up.
5)  Using only one of the weapons at your disposal (Demo) only insures that you'll be the first to run out of ammo. 
4)  If you make your living in the shadows (Spy), its only a matter of time before you're caught.
3)  If you are close enough to light the fire (Pyro), you are most likely close enough to feel the heat.
2)  Having everyone play the same role (Soldier) is the easiest way to getting nothing accomplished. 
1)  All of us are better then any one of us.

(0 Comments)

I guess I don't have much to say because I find it difficult (even challenging) to keep up with my BLOG.  I admire people that have the ability to consistently write witty and interesting thoughts on a daily basis.  Me, I am more of a monthly, bi-monthly, even quarterly guy which equates to dull and sparatic.  In almost every context, dull and sparatic are not good adjectives.  I mean no one strives to be dull and / or sparatic.  Some people accept their limitations and try to put a good spin on it as to say that they are reliable, dependable, or even easy going.  I don't buy that either.  Sometimes less is more, but I think with BLOGs more is more.

My experiences, though, are very interesting as of late.  I am working with a variety of individuals and companies from around the world on their technology projects.  Some projects are incredibly vast and complicated - like assisting government agencies in Africa in moving to Linux or delivering "the mail" across a Linux enterprise for a media company in Germany.  I am involved in providing elementary students with the portal to visit vast virtual worlds and also in making the computers more usable for the visually impared.  Other projects are very personal - like working directly with individuals who are trying to create and build their own Linux-centric technology companies or assisting a dad in trying to make a mapping program work on his daughter's laptop.  In both the micro and macro projects, I see first hand how technology is evolving and impacting the lives of so many people.  If only I could put all those thoughts and feelings into words.

When I see the opportunities available with technology today, I am simply amazed.  Imagine delivering standard applications across mixed platforms or porting specific PC applications to Linux and Mac environments.  10 years ago, this was not possible.  10 years from now, it may be ancient history.  I truely enjoy being a part (if only the smallest part) of the technology revolution.  If only, I could write it down more.

(1 Comments)

So today, Stefan was helping someone that posted a cry for help on our forums.

In digging a bit further, he discovered that this guy was actively working against us, as you can see by searching for bonkeykong on this pirate site.

So this is like stealing a car from me, then giving the garage door opener in the car to a buddy so the buddy can go to my garage and steal my other car. Then, after he's driven around a bit, he calls me up and asks where to find the gas cap. If I had that much gall, I'd be a much richer man.

It's also terribly amusing that the poster doesn't realize that we essentially give away our work for free, and that there is a straight forward way to get this for free, that has forums where people will help him, and where his willingness to help will in turn be entirely a force for good.

Further, if he wanted to go with CrossOver, we have a free trial, and we offer a money back guarantee (which, if you're a clever Pirate, is a perfect way to get a free copy and annoy us at the same time). Heck, you can sign up to be an Advocate and totally p0wn us!

But no, bonkeykong decided car jacking was his thing.

It hurts a little; people like this seem to assume we're a nameless faceless and therefore somehow 'evil' corporation. We're not. We're people; hard working, overly idealistic, often underpaid people.

Of course, I'm not a stooge for the RIAA. Digital technology changes things; making a copy of a bag of bits is not the same as knocking me over and taking my wallet. bonkeykong isn't going to roast in a circle of hell because of this, although maybe he'll be darned to heck if we're lucky .

And I am adamant that I only want people's money if they are cheerful to give it to us.

But I think it's positive proof that Pirates aren't very bright, so this counts as a point for the Ninjas!

Cheers,

Jeremy

(10 Comments)

I thought I'd take a minute to go a little more in depth on our recent announcement of 'experimental' builds of CrossOver.

It is a very exciting time for Wine - we've been making great strides on our way to Wine 1.0, and I'm thrilled with that progress.

But sometimes we struggle with the success and progress of Wine. We'll get customers that come to us and say "CrossOver stinks, Wine runs my application much better." And what can be deeply frustrating is that often Wine will run their application because of our work. This has long been a struggle for us; while we do a lot of the active development on Wine, we take a lot of time to refine that and polish it so that it works reliably before we ship a CrossOver release. Sometimes that makes people complain that CrossOver is old and dull when compared to Wine.

Of course, if you've ever done technical support, you know that dull is good.

But many of our customers don't want dull. They want latest and greatest, the more bleeding edge, the better. And since we're often doing the bleeding edge work, it can be frustrating not to be able to give our customers our very latest work.

So now we have a facility that lets our developers take control. Any developer can now request of our QA lead to have a development build 'blessed'. If the QA lead does a modicum of testing, and feels that it is good enough, then we'll put the build up. That should hopefully speed up the process of making experimental builds available, and allow our developers to more directly interact with our customers.

Cheers,

Jeremy

(4 Comments)

Hello All,

Now that we've shipped CrossOver Games I want to outline our short term future plans for the next weeks and months:

One of the central ideas of CrossOver Games are quick updates. Since testing and making sure that all supported applications run takes a while, we want to release unsupported 'bleeding edge' builds regularly for those who want to try the latest and greatest code. During the crossover games beta phase Wine already moved forward a bit. I am currently working on stabilizing those improvements, once the supported games run properly again I plan to release such an unsupported build. The improvements include

* Performance improvements for Guild Wars and other games, especially on MacOS. I've written that during the beta testing of CrossOver games, but I considered it too unstable for adding it into the late betas.

* Bump mapping support for older radeon cards(radeon 8500 to 9200). This is a side effect of some architectural improvements I have made to provide a few potential Google Summer of Code Projects for Wine.

* Dynamic pixel format selection, some work done by Roderick Colenbrander(Thanks!). This can improve performance and it is required for Antialiasing support. Antialiasing is not fully supported yet, but the major obstacle is removed.

* Some improvements of our texture format support reporting, thanks to Roderick again. This is some work towards better support for floating point textures as needed for new games like Call of Duty 4, Crysis or Bioshock. This still needs to be polished a bit, many games like Half Life 2 do not like it yet.

* Some bug fixing

I hope that the build is ready within the next month, but I cannot promise it for sure if unexpected problems occur. I will keep you updated on the progress!

Thank you for helping us improve Wine, and have fun playing!

Cheers,
Stefan

(5 Comments)

Today we shipped CrossOver Games. I am very excited by this change; I have enjoyed computer games all of my life, and I like the idea that we can help others enjoy their new computers fully.

I'm also tickled by the story of how CrossOver Games came to be, and thought I would share it with you all.

We have long focused on productivity applications. Now, last year we did officially add support for games, and we made a few hires so that we could more directly support all of the great work being done in Wine on games. But, truthfully, our core focus has been on productivity applications such as Microsoft Office and Quicken.

So go back to last fall and early this winter. We're hard at work on the back breaking work of fixing Office 2007, Outlook, and recent Adobe products. We're grinding along, making slow progress. And all this time we keep noticing the most amazing progress on games. Stefan, along with the volunteers on the Wine project, is just raging in a cage; a day hardly goes by without another game running, or the framerate of a game rising, or a long standing game defect fixed.

And our Advocates start to notice; our Office support in our nightly builds isn't all that great, but boy is the game support coming along nicely.

And someone asks me: when are you going to ship all of this great work on games?

Well, I've sworn we won't ship CrossOver 7.0 until Office 2007 runs.

And, what's more, we really can't have CrossOver 7 be affected by games; after all, we need plenty of time to test and make sure it is stable and robust. At the pace and speed they are moving, before we finished a first QA run, they'd have a bunch more games fixes ready to ship.

In fact, Stefan and those game guys are going so nuts, they really should be on their own release cycle...

Doh!

So I'm happy to say that CrossOver Games came into existence strictly because of the brilliant work of a bunch of talented developers. You could argue that they forced my hand (forced, yes, it was torture for me to test Civ IV, torture, I tell you! ).

So, thank you to Roderick Colenbrander, Christian Costa, Alexander Dorofeyev, Stefan Dösinger, Jason Edmeades, Jason Green, Ivan Gyurdiev, Maarten Lankhorst, Vitaliy Margolen, Marcus Meissner, Oliver Stieber, Lionel Ulmer, Henri Verbeet and many others.

I am deeply grateful for all of their hard work, and I hope that we can help many people to enjoy the fruit of their labors, even if that enjoyment comes in the form of blowing each other to smithereens...

Cheers,

Jeremy

(21 Comments)

My entire life has been centered around playing video games.  I come from the generation that just played the heck out of games.  From my earliest Atari 2600 with 40 or 50 games to my Nintendo box, I have always been enchanted and captivated by video games.  Not that I was ever good enough to take on the world or even the best in my neighborhood, but I have always enjoyed the mental break that is derived from focusing on nothing else but dominating your enemies.

As I am getting older (and wiser), my focus is changing.  I appreciate more strategic games with less action but a more encompassing story.  I no longer want to destroy the world but instead save it from the bad guys (whomever they may be).  I no longer wish for the stress of having to make life and death decisions in fractions of seconds.  I want to foster growth, build and execute upon a drawn out plan, and release the benevolent leader from within. 

Actually, I just really stink at first person shooters and find them frustrating now as groups of 10 year olds pound me for sport and hobby.  I know some of these "young guns" have made their reputation off of beating me and me alone.  That's the only explanation I want to believe as to why I can't seem to survive long enough to check my weapons, aim, and fire.  That and my responsibilities as the Vice President, Sales keep me from playing hours on end.  That last line is a lie.  I actually play for hours on end at work, and I still stink which means it must be my state of the art MacBook.

The cold dark truth is that with the release of CrossOver Games I can't claim that my MacBook is the sole source of my 'suckdom'.  CrossOver Games is coming along very nicely.  Within the next week or so, we will be releasing the coolest emulation solution for Mac and Linux platforms.  Soon, you too can take on hordes of 10 year olds (hey, shouldn't these kids be at school???) in Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike, and other really, really cool games.  While this functionality has been available in CrossOver Mac and CrossOver Linux for quite some time, CrossOver Games is the optimized platform specially tweaked to run games at native speeds.  Games is continuously updated to take advantage of all the latest and greatest CrossOver developments.  So far, my very embarrassing game play has been stable, very fluid, and very fast.  While I can't attest that CrossOver Games will make you a better gamer, I can testify that CrossOver Games won't be the reason why the 10 year olds use your carcass as bait (did I mention that these kids should be in school!!!).    

I know if I keep practicing for hours and days on end that I can get somewhat better.  Of course, my wife, my daughter, my friends, my family, my co-workers, and (most importantly) my boss have other plans for my time.  Without being able to make that time commitment, I'll never be an elite gamer and be able to turn pro.  I'll never be able to play in the 'big game'. I know what you're thinking and you're right.  My wife and my boss don't buy that excuse either.

(5 Comments)

I'd like to explain how we decide what to work on next and share our plans for 2008.

First, the big picture: the goal is to finish Wine so that it is a perfect reimplementation of the Windows API, thereby runing nearly all Windows applications flawlessly.

That is a huge challenge; it's going to take a while yet. And since I continue to miss the right Powerball numbers, we continue to bring out new releases of CrossOver to bring polished, if incomplete, versions of Wine to our customers. The idea is that we bring you joy with Wine as we work towards the ultimate goal, and that in gratitude, you buy CrossOver so we can buy food, mortgages, and more Powerball tickets.

Deciding how best to focus our efforts so as to both bring our customers the most joy and to keep Wine moving down that road is a hard challenge. I take as my primary input first the reports of problems from our active customers; I have a 'bugs pending tickets' report that is my primary priority list. Next, I use the list of top votes and pledges from our compatibility center. From there, I add in the estimates I get back from the developers on how hard something will be, and then mix in some intuition and go from there.

Normally, the intuition piece is a smaller role, but this year, we're going for a big leap. In the next few weeks we are going to launch a new product called 'CrossOver Games'. CrossOver Games is an entry level product that lets you play a broad range of games, particularly games with a lot of replayability such as MMOs like World of Warcraft and the range of games from Valve (e.g. Team Fortress 2, CSS, and so on). CrossOver Games will be available for free to any of our CrossOver Mac or Linux Professional customers. The idea is that we will rev CrossOver Games more quickly than regular CrossOver, so as to better take advantage of all of the great work being done on Wine with respect to games. The regular CrossOver will continue on a more stable and reliable pace. We're doing this in part to try to generate some buzz and interest; we feel like Rodney Dangerfield when it comes to games - we'd like to earn some respect. We feel strongly that CrossOver will be the finest way to run games on a Linux or Mac system, and we want to shout that from the rooftops!

Beyond the Games launch, we also have a lot of major improvements in store. We plan to launch CrossOver 7 for both Mac and Linux some time in April. The highlights of CrossOver 7 include support for Office 2007, as well as support for Photoshop CS/CS2 (and hopefully CS3) along with all versions of Dreamweaver, and a few other Adobe applications (thanks, Dan!). Of course, we have a lot of fixes our customers have requested. Office 2003, notably Outlook, should be much improved. Quicken 2007/8 should be able to connect properly with banks. There will be fixes across the board in other applications, notably Internet Explorer 6.

After CrossOver 7, we will turn our focus to several major areas where Wine is lacking. First and foremost is going to be better support for .NET based applications. We are hoping that will allow us to properly support modern versions of Quickbooks. We also hope to support modern versions of iTunes, and we're going to keep fighting to add support for things like the NetFlix player (if only so I can run them on my MythTV system). We'll also be implementing a DIB Engine - a tool we need to use to eliminate some performance bottlenecks in certain applications. This should help performance in Quicken, Visio, and Powerpoint for sure, and a range of other applications as well.

Essentially, our goal is to finish all of the basic building blocks that Wine needs. We hope to mark that event by releasing Wine 1.0. Of course, there will still be a lot of work to be done from there, but our hope is that increasingly applications will 'just work'.

Cheers,

Jeremy

(8 Comments)

The Minnesota Vikings use to employ a philosophy of drafting the best available athlete regardless of their position or the team's immediate needs. An interesting philosophy in that the Vikings believed that with the best athletes they could and would win a Super Bowl Unfortunately for the Vikings, this rule did not apply to coaches who lose NFC Championship Games at home. Yes, the loss to Atlanta (even after all these years) still stings.

For sales, many companies ignore the 'best athlete' philosophy and hire based on tenure, industry experience, product knowledge, and market connections. I have always believed that hiring in this manner is a poor indicator of future success, and I believe that it is only prevalent in my profession because its the safe decision to make. No one gets fired for hiring a person with the right pedigree? Its this line of thinking that allows the general public to think less of the professional salesperson.

For life, the path to success is almost always filled with hardship and pain. That's why its the lesser traveled road. In sales, I believe that the 'best athlete' is the salesperson who has achieved their success while overcoming significant challenges. In sales, consistently fighting through adversity is the hallmark of a champion. There is no substitute for the planning and tenacity that it takes to be truly successful, and this gift is not honed to a sharp point overnight. Personally, I truly enjoy surrounding myself with these types of people. Working with these 'best athletes' forces me raise my game and in turn become more successful.

For the marketplace, we are seeing many more consumers select the 'best athlete' as their personal computer. Apple and Linux are on the rise because more consumers are demanding better performance, greater usability, better functionality, greater style, more power, better value, and (maybe most important) fewer vulnerabilities. While Microsoft has the better pedigree, its performance has been compromised over its last few releases culminating with Vista. Even though Microsoft is still the safer decision for IT professionals, this decision is no longer going unchallenged because usability and functionality are becoming more critical. The end result is that we are receiving more requests from businesses and consumers wanting to run their PC applications on other platforms. From government agencies to educational departments to individual users, we are seeing the 'best athlete' philosophy is starting to take root. If these groups of consumers continue supporting these platforms instead of being satisfied with status quo, they may achieve the greatness associated with winning the Super Bowl (darn the Vikings!!).

For CodeWeavers, we are one of the 'supplements' making the 'best athlete' better. Consumers are becoming very interested in CrossOver because it is in-line with their desire for something better. CodeWeavers is essentially giving them their cake, and this message is slowly getting out to the masses. The positive reviews in the trade publications along with the press from Google is helping mainstream our efforts and is creating greater awareness for our software. As more consumers refuse the acceptance of solutions less apt to meet their needs, our growth and prevalence in the marketplace will only continue to increase. We might even live in a world where one day Microsoft is no longer reflective of a safe decision but of a decision made without much effort. I think even when that happens the Minnesota Vikings will still have a difficult time making the Super Bowl.

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Hello world!

For those of you that have not met me yet, I am the Webmaster here at CodeWeavers. I am responsible for the wondrous array of front-end and back-end website code you see before you. I'm the guy you imagine pulling hair out behind the scenes when the website crashes (or worse). Yep, that'd be me.

I'm excited for our new public blog system. It gives us a chance to give you a glimpse at what goes on inside the hearts and minds of hard working weavers. Feel free to comment on our posts. We appreciate all feedback given.

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Every great once in a while a sales rep hits what can only be considered 'Nirvana'. Account management is on target; customers are happy; leads are coming in the door; the phone is ringing; and proposals are going out. All the good stuff that every sales person dreams of when they picture the "perfect day". The opposite of Sales Nirvana, of course, is the reality that is every other day of your existence - not Nirvana. For the past four months (wow, four months), I have found my own slice of Nirvana at CodeWeavers. In learning the software, I am amazed and excited at the possibilities of what we have to offer. CrossOver eliminates the need for the Microsoft operating system!!! That's exciting. Any viable option to Microsoft is exciting, and I think users are seeing that today.

Monopolies upset the apple cart. They force people into situations they would otherwise prefer to avoid. Like the monopolies before it, Microsoft makes its living off of being the only game in town. While other desktop solutions existed (Linux, OSX, DOS, UNIX), no other operating system ran PC applications. When you are Microsoft and have the world by the 'nuts', you can allow yourself to get sloppy, belligerent, obnoxious, and even rude and the world takes it. When Microsoft introduced Windows 95, it marked a significant stake in the evolution of the computer universe. No longer did users have to have niche skills or be experts to use simple applications. When Microsoft introduced Vista, it marked a devolution in that the user was no longer important or even a consideration in the process. Software got complicated again by requiring users to know how to manage security settings to get joy. Somewhere along the way (probably while Microsoft was taking all its money to the bank), the world collectively decided to stop taking it and pushed back at the 'evil empire'.

In areas where wheelbarrows of money are not readily available and the median household income is considerably less then the US poverty level, Microsoft has lost its foothold on the throats of consumers. We now live in a world where users in Asia, South America, Eastern Europe, and Africa are aligning themselves with a flavor of Linux. While Microsoft could justify that turn of events as "those people don't have money anyways", it has no answers to Apple stealing its market share in North America, Japan, and Europe. When your biggest rival doubles its market share in two years (Forbes), you take notice and fight back. Unfortunately, Vista is a punch in the face for most users and Yahoo would rather lay off employees then sell out to Microsoft. The resounding message is that the market is clearly seeking to move away from Microsoft's grip. THIS IS VERY EXCITING FOR CODEWEAVERS!!! This is our opportunity. This can become our Nirvana (or at least my sales' Nirvana).

Winning while others are loosing doesn't sound very sporting. I should hope that we all can win, be happy, find our Nirvana. However, Team Fortress 2 has taught me that winning consists of two very critical elements - beating others while staying alive. If that philosophy is good enough for my 'Heavy', it should be good enough for me. If finding our Nirvana means the Microsoft takes a couple shots to the head, who am I to stand in the way of our happiness.

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Welcome to our first public blog post!

We plan to use this blog as a tool to share news tidbits and thoughts that don't fit into formal announcements or press releases.

My hope is to share our thinking and plans as they evolve. I also hope that this will help spur folks to write to us to share ideas and thoughts on how we can do a better job. While we try to have a broad range of forums, both general and specific to applications, you should always feel free to write me directly at anytime at jwhite@codeweavers.com.

With this first post, I wanted to start with a look back, and share my story and the story of how CodeWeavers began our mission.

I have always been a self-confessed computer geek; my passion for programming and computers started as I'd crouch at the Radio Shack typing out programs on a TRS-80. It blossomed as I worked on a wide range of diverse and interesting computer systems. In the 90's, I was distressed by the rise of Windows as the dominant operating system. Not so much because I felt that Windows was so bad, but more because its monopoly position was sucking all the fun out of computing.

Imagine if you will for a moment a car afficianado who is told that the only car anyone will be allowed to drive is a Buick Riviera. Nothing particularly wrong with a Buick, but wouldn't it be nice to take a Corvette out once in a while? That's how I feel.

I founded CodeWeavers in May of 1996. I wanted to do technically challenging work and work with great people. In 1997 I discovered - and then fell in love with - the Wine Project. I was captivated by the idea that Wine could remove the Applications Barrier to Entry and thus make it possible for people to use any operating system they wanted. And it was such an audacious and impossible task that I couldn't help but be enchanted.

And so in 1999 I reinvented CodeWeavers to focus on the Wine project. We were fortunate to have Alexandre Julliard, Wine's leader, join us, and he was followed by many of the veteran Wine contributors.

Since 1999, then, we have worked long and hard to fulfill the promise of Wine - to make Unix-like operating systems into fully Windows compatible systems.

We started in 2000 with a shot of venture capital that let us explore a variety of business plans. Then in 2002, we launched the first version of CrossOver Office, which was the basis for all of our CrossOver products. Luckily, CrossOver was a success (especially since the venture capital had run out :-/),and we have been able to survive and thrive on the income we get from CrossOver ever since. I remain grateful to each and every person that buys a copy of CrossOver and thereby enables us to keep on doing the work we do on Wine each day.

I am deeply proud of what we've accomplished - Microsoft Office and many other productivity applications run cleanly in Wine. Many games and demanding multimedia appications work well in Wine. And every day Wine supports just a little bit more; every day I get a report from someone that their favorite application "just works". Further, I'm also deeply proud that we've been able to do this, all the while supporting the Wine Project and Free Software by contributing all of our Wine work back to the Wine project. I'm tickled when I see someone has been able to use our work in some creative and powerful way - that is the power of Free Software, and I'm thrilled that we've been able to contribute so much.

Finally, I'm most excited that all of our hard work means that Wine is on the verge of being declared '1.0'. That is, Wine is nearly good enough to start people thinking that they don't have to buy Windows to run their favorite Windows program, and that perhaps they don't have to buy a Windows PC at all.

I can't help but hope that, in some small way, we are contributing to the greater diversity, vibrancy, and overall joy in the computing world.

That is why I am here, and that is what I fight for every day.

Thanks for listening. Stay tuned for my next entry, when I sketch out our road map for 2008.

Cheers,

Jeremy

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