i have long wondered exactly what it's like working at american megatrends, phoenix, or award (before they were acquired.) as far as i can tell, these companies existed for nearly 40 years as nothing more than long-tail IP trolls. they each made an IBM BIOS clone in the 80s, then added very, very little to it over the next couple decades.
mostly, these companies existed so that motherboard manufacturers could buy 90% of a BIOS premade, then add the necessary customizations for their board. this is why so many CMOS setup programs have horrendous typos in them - they were probably customized by a contractor hired for one week
so, sure, someone working for these corporate entities did Real Work, but that was in, like, 1985. it was probably one guy, and he's not with the company anymore. whoever was working there in 1996 or 2006 was absolutely profit-squatting - the work done to create their BIOS clones was long, long, long done, with minor exceptions for shit like Y2k compliance updates. they were just siphoning off of its continued necessity for the PC clone market. so, did they actually employ any developers? or salespeople? how weird must that job have been? sitting around in a silent building, no moving and shaking going on, no Deals, just there out of sheer necessity.
AMI and Award did a bit of dabbling in other markets, but we're talking, like, POST diagnostic cards, and that was in the 80s when there were literally hundreds of companies inexplicably competing in spaces like that. otherwise, as far as i know, they had no purpose in existing other than to profit off of a few kilobytes of code that some past employee wrote.
but phoenix, in the late 2000s, apparently decided they were "failing." how can that be possible? my guess: it wasn't
they'd long since bought Award, meaning there were only two suppliers of BIOS' for the entire clone market; themselves, and AMI, and I'm positive the market was evenly split between the two. it is beyond belief that Phoenix could have been unprofitable, given that they were performing no work, required no employees, produced no product, and made literally 100% profit, simply by existing. so, presumably what they meant by "failing" was "not infinitely growing," because capitalism is so brainwormed that it can't accept "making tons of money, forever, for zero work" as a definition of success.
so, inexplicably, they hired a new CEO. to, uh, "save" them. and this always goes the same way - the guy comes in and says "the way you should save this company is by becoming a completely different company. easy peasy. and of course, by 'become', i mean 'buy'." so they proceeded to buy a bunch of stupid garbage, including a fucking driver finder. like, "a program you run that supposedly finds driver updates." they tried to "save" their "failing" company by buying and distributing malware.
but as far as i can tell, tucked in between this "fry's electronics begins selling Bazic-brand post-its and counterfeit perfume"-grade flailing, they also began to develop new software, in-house. And, I mean, really, genuinely ambitious software.
One of their products, FailSafe, was apparently a firmware-based tracking app for recovering stolen PCs. I'm guessing that never remotely worked, but it's at least novel! The idea that you can't knock it out by just wiping the hard drive seems cool!
But another one was so ambitious that it actually kind of stops you in your tracks. you go, "wait, what" like you heard wrong. They can't possibly have meant what you just heard.
They developed a consumer-grade hypervisor.
Called Phoenix Hyperspace, it looked like nothing so much as yet another entry in the the then-popular (and also then-reviled-and-ignored) push to find a way to make computers boot faster.
There were several companies trying to do this at the time, and it is a far less interesting subject than Hyperspace, so I'll explain it first. Basically:
- SSDs were not yet common, and performant ones, even less so
- Netbooks were being shipped with garbage-ass Atom CPUs
- Everything was being shipped with way too little RAM
- Windows 8 had not yet come out, so Windows was pretty inefficient
- Standby/sleep/hibernate was not very reliable on PCs
So it was perceived by manufacturers that consumers were being forced to shut their computers down and start them back up way too often, and wasting too much time doing that. It was believed that they would appreciate the ability to boot their machine directly into an alternate, lightweight OS, one that would be able to cold-boot more quickly than Windows. Obviously, this was Linux, because what alternative was there.
One company produced Splashtop Linux - they were called DeviceVM back then, but have since rebranded to Splashtop and sell a remote desktop product that's pretty good. Splashtop was an extremely pared down Linux instance with a web browser, email client, chat client, and very limited photo album and media player apps. Several EeePCs had Splashtop and Asus also embedded it in some motherboards. I own two Lenovos with different versions of it; they both suck. (Pic 1 and 2 above)
Besides those basic apps (which have been heavily modified to make it impossible to break out and actually use the underlying OS) there are dozens of "apps" which are actually just shortcuts to websites. Gmail, youtube, banking, even the Games icon just open websites. Needless to say, Splashtop was nearly useless when new, and is completely unusable now due to TLS 1.0 being deprecated.
And to be clear, Splashtop is absolutely nothing special. It's simply a Linux distro with a quick-and-easy dual-boot setup app, pared down so it boots quickly and isn't confusing to people without Linux skills. Which, of course, isn't even true - the proverbial "grandma" would be absolutely lost in this UI, and none of my machines actually boots any quicker into Splashtop versus Windows. Some contemporary reviews confirm this was true when new, so I have no idea how any of this shit ever shipped.
There was also MontaVista Linux (pic 3 above), which is best known for being used in a shitload of horrible Linux-powered devices, I think set top boxes and the like. Dell, however, shipped it as a product they called Latitude-ON. It sucks more than Splashtop in several ways, but has a remarkable distinction: Dell sold it in three SKUs, one that simply dual-booted from your HDD, one that installed onto a separate SSD in supported laptops, and one that, and I can't overstate this enough, booted from a separate processor.
Let me be clear: I have a Latitude Z600 here. When you press the power button, it turns on the Core 2 Duo CPU. When you press the Latitude-ON button, however, it turns on a Texas Instruments OMAP ARM SoC with its own flash module, which boots into MontaVista, then proceeds to brain-slug the motherboard, somehow. It takes over the keyboard, touchpad, monitor, and network hardware, but nothing else. You can't even plug in a USB mouse.
This is stupid, and almost cool, but ultimately utterly wasted. Their copy of MontaVista is both ugly, and even more barebones than Splashtop - for christ's sake, it doesn't even have windowing. It forces the current task to be fullscreen at all times. It's just primitive. I could write 10,000 words about what Dell could have done with this but inexplicably didn't.
So, these things were all dumb wastes of time that nobody cared about and nobody used. After two or three years they disappeared and nobody even remembered they existed.
Hyperspace (pic 4 above) was a whole different can of worms. It's another pared-down Linux instance, but instead of dual-booting, it lived in a VM and booted along with the machine. You could jump directly into it from Windows at any time, in about a second. The theory was that you'd use this to actively manage your battery consumption: when you're doing "heavy" tasks, use Windows. When you're ready to Kick Back, Relax And Do Nothing Of Consequence, jump into Hyperspace. You switch VMs, Windows gets suspended, and your TDP (supposedly) plummets.
As far as I can tell, Hyperspace had more real apps - including an actual productivity suite - but even more intriguingly, it had some amount of data exchange between the VMs. You could, ostensibly, create a Powerpoint presentation in Windows, then switch to Hyperspace and open it. And if you downloaded a file that nothing in Hyperspace could open, it could immediately switch to Windows and open it with the default app.
These are incredible concepts. Whether any of it worked, let alone well... I don't know that yet.
It's extremely hard to find a machine with Hyperspace. The only respectable device ever sold with it was the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Hybrid, which nobody has. It was sold, there are spare parts on ebay, but no machines. The only other machines I've found that definitely had it were Samsungs; I could only find one on ebay, a horrible little N210 netbook with no power supply and probably no HDD. I'll find out in a week or two if it still has the Hyperspace partition; I doubt it does, and the trail will go cold there.
They DID make a trial version. Oh, did I mention that this was fucking Saas? Yeah, Hyperspace had an associated ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION. So... there's that. But nobody mirrored the trial and it's long gone off the internet. Plus, there were multiple SKU levels, and I doubt the trial version implemented the full hypervisor.
What a fucking moonshot, though, especially for a company that had been doing absolutely fucking nothing for 20 years. I can't find any evidence that Phoenix bought any part of this; it seems like they actually developed it, themselves, possibly from whole cloth. That's ballsy! Sure, Apple could get away with that, but... nobody else could. Even if they licensed the hypervisor from someone, it was still a power play. like, god damn. consumer hypervisor! i mean, it utterly failed. but. it was still a power play.
in conclusion: with 20/20 hindsight, we can see clearly that this new CEO was a total fucking dry hump and all his ideas were stupid and unnecessary. all his initiatives evaporated within two years. they sold off all their "products" for less than they spent to buy / develop them, they're back to having no product other than clone firmware, and... they're still around. they developed an EFI firmware, but I'm pretty sure they did that once, in 2010, and are yet again just milking the work they did a decade ago.
so this entire thing was a huge, stupid waste of time. exactly the same as every other time in history that a CEO has been hired to "fix" a company with which there was nothing wrong. you can set your watch by this shit.
