PKWare Zips to Growth

Rob Kennedy writes "The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a story about PKWare's new business plan. It talks about the investment group that bought the company after founder Phil Katz's death in 2000, and the plan for PKWare to produce what president and COO Timothy H. Kennedy (no relation) calls 'the next generation of zip' by adding various security features."

Comments

Shareware?

[Kj0n]

From the article:
PKWare no longer sells its products as shareware.

Is this a good idea? I believe that shareware is the only way to get your product known to all computer users (apart from bundeling it with Microsoft Office). There are not that many computer users that still known PKWare, and when this strategy is followed, that won't change.

Re:Are zips still relevent?

[Ed Avis]

In the days when I used pkzip, I first bundled up the files into an uncompressed zipfile with -e0, and then compressed that. This gives you a few percent over compressing the files straight into a zipfile, when they are compressed individually. You lose the ability to extract individual files but who needs that anyway?

IMHO, since 99% of the time all you do with archives is create them or extract them, it's not worth implementing features like 'add to archive', 'delete from archive' or 'update archive'. Maybe those made sense with SEA ARC on CP/M when disk space was scarce and CPUs slow, but not now. You might as well take advantage of the simplicity and better compression that comes from treating the archive as a single lump.

Therefore the Unix model of tar and then a separate compression program makes more sense - even though tar is such a crusty and wasteful format. The only reason to use zipfiles still is compatibility.

(Although maybe someone will prove me wrong and say 'I update existing zipfiles every day, it's an essential feature, what I do is...'.)

Re:Great

[Ed Avis]

Hmm. 'Do one thing and do it well' might be a better strategy. There are existing very capable encryption and signing programs you can use on individual files or the whole zipfile; there are plenty of existing version management tools. Let the archiver just archive files.

Re:Encryption and compression make a lot of sense.

[dido]

Hopefully, if this is what they want to do, they will do better than the embarrasingly insecure "encryption" that the old DOS PKZip included (a cryptographically-weak LFSR-based stream cipher). With good support for cryptographic standards, they could have something here.

By the way, you always do encryption AFTER data compression. Doing it before data compression ensures that your compression ratio is close to 0%.

New Business Plan???

[Corrado]

When Katz was in charge, PKWare's programmers often would work on new features that they found interesting rather than targeting specific needs of potential customers, Kennedy said.

"In some cases what they did was successful, but in many cases what they did wasn't anywhere near successful," he said. "The company from this standpoint now is market driven."

This is the most disturbing part of the whole story. I think that PKWare will die a slow and painful death as all the "interesting" ideas get thrown on the floor. Why do companies think that purchasing a successful company and then changing the basics around how they operate will make them grow?!?

Yea, making the company "market driven" is going to work.

There's no telling.

[twitter]

$40 is not too high a price for not being able to figure out some combination of tar, find, grep, and crypt, but there's no telling where these folks will go with their new "Market Driven" company:

...The investors who bought the company following Katz's death in 2000 bolstered the top management team. PKWare's technology hot shots, ... are supported by experienced software executives. And the company has its first professional and disciplined sales force.

...When Katz was in charge, PKWare's programmers often would work on new features that they found interesting rather than targeting specific needs of potential customers, Kennedy said.

"In some cases what they did was successful, but in many cases what they did wasn't anywhere near successful," he said. "The company from this standpoint now is market driven."

The engineers are no longer in charge, money is. All the clueless and stupid "features" that corporate slave drivers can think of will become projects for the Brown Deer survivors. I can imagine them asking for central repositories of file lists, tables of "sensitive" files that can't be ziped, and other silly work arounds the serious lack of data control their w2k desktops have. I can also imagine that half of the "I wanna micro manage my staff to death" initiatives will directly contrardict the requirements for the other half. Sounds like hell if they really have remade the company that way, and sure the customer gets screwed along with the lusers. That's what happens when you put sales in front of engineering.

I could be wrong. Dr. Kelly could be a fine fellow and have no intentions of making this happen. It will be difficult for him to manage the monster he's making. Good luck and never trust M$, the folks that bought 5th Generation Software to kill Fastback and who have always seen backup utilities as a threat and aid to "pirates".