| An interview with CodeWeavers CEO, Jeremy White (Part 2) |
(continuation)
After playing with -- and being suitably impressed with -- CrossOver Office's added support for Quicken and QuickBooks (see Part 1), I prevailed upon Jeremy White, CEO of CodeWeavers, to answer some questions I had regarding his company's latest CrossOver magic. Here's what I learned . . .
Lehrbaum: How complex it is to make CrossOver Office (via wine) support Quicken or QuickBooks? What sorts of modifications (etc.) did you have to do?
 White: The first hurdle with an application is always installation. Quickbooks, for example, required us to build our own 'fake' Program Manager before it would install. Once the application is running, the next challenge is to find all of the critical bugs. Here, what we like to do is have the application tested by an expert on the product. In the case of Quicken, this turned out to be my wife! Once the bugs are identified, we prioritize them, and then knock out all the ones that we feel would keep someone from using the product. And, obviously, how far we get determines whether we consider the application 'gold', 'silver', or 'bronze'.
Lehrbaum: What were some of the tougher challenges?
White: The biggest challenge with Quicken was all the different versions we tried to support, and hunting through used book stores to find different versions. I think we got them all, but I'm not sure -- from where I sit, I can see a little shelf filled with different versions. As you know, even seemingly subtle differences in versions, e.g. QuickBooks Basic vs. QuickBooks Pro, can prevent the software from working.
What was hard about Visio was that it was an entirely separate 'class' of application. This is actually interesting, at least to me, so I'll belabor the point. What we find is that applications tend to fall into classes, largely divided by the knowledge of the programmers at the company that make it. So, for example, the programming teams for Word and Excel were clearly very similar, because solving problems in one solved problems in the other. Much the same applies to Quicken and Quickbooks; as we solved problems in one, we'd find the other would improve. What's exciting to me is that this implies that if we can fix one Jumpstart game, they'll all start running!
Lehrbaum: Did the issues that needed to be addressed relate to undocumented Windows functions used by the app, or non-API functions and/or environmental considerations expected by the app?
White: In the case of Quicken and QuickBooks, no. For Visio, you can see that the programmers at Visio had used some rather interesting pieces of the Windows API. These required new implementations or new understandings of the Windows API, and a reworking of Wine. For the undocumented API calls, the king is Internet Explorer!
Lehrbaum: Does CrossOver Office become more 'windows application compatible' with every new app that you add support for? In other words, might we expect to ever see CrossOver Office -- or WINE, for that matter -- get to where most apps would work automagically, as opposed to CodeWeavers having to support each app on an app-by-app basis?
White: Absolutely. I was thrilled to discover that after Alexandre solved a problem with Quicken that I was able to install 4 out of the 6 kids games I have at home, and they ran quite well! My hope is that we'll reach 'critical mass' at some point in the next 6-12 months. However, our core value is that we support specific applications, so we will never drop that part of our offering.
Lehrbaum: Could CodeWeavers somehow make it possible for app vendors and/or open-source developers to get CrossOver Office to support apps by themselves, so that codeweavers isn't always in the 'critical path' to getting an app working under CrossOver Office? My point here is that CodeWeavers is limited in what it can do, whereas the world-wide developer community could handle many more apps. What about an SDK of some sort, to support this possibility?
White: Actually, that's the whole point behind WINE being open source. There is an enormous amount of work being done by developers all over the world on WINE, all of it flowing through www.winehqorg. That's why it has always been so very important to us that we help the WINE community, and not harm it -- we find those contributions invaluable to our own efforts.
Lehrbaum: Today's news announcement says: "Also new to CrossOver Office 1.2 are a number usability enhancements designed to make the Windows application user experience smoother, faster, and more convenient." Can you be more specific? What are some of the "usability enhancements"?
White: Well, there a lot of little things. For example, we detect international locales better, so folks don't have to configure quite so much. Also, with older Office versions, when using an upgrade edition, it used to hunt forever, searching the whole hard drive for an upgrade. Now we've constrained it just to the CrossOver world, making it return more quickly. You can now install the first service pack as well. We deal better with alternate CD drive locations, and handle installers with spaces. Stuff like that. We've also made it possible to change where "My Documents" points to, so that's a bit nicer now. It defaults to your $HOME directory, instead of some weird location way down deep in the bowels of 'fake_windows'.
Lehrbaum: What's next? TurboTax? Photoshop? . . . ?
White: Actually, our customers tell us that TurboTax works nicely. And we're 'this close' on Photoshop! Actually, our next critical focus is going to be on improving the applications we current support. This is going to include bringing our support for Office up to Office XP, supporting Access fully, and improving Outlook and IE until we consider them 'gold'. After that, the plan is to tackle applications by area, so, for example, to nail the web editing tools from Macromedia, and then programs such as AutoCAD.
Lehrbaum: Please briefly comment on the success of CrossOver Office/Plugin so far. Any major deals completed or in the works for thousands of copies with well known (Fortune 500ish) companies, governments, institutions, etc?
White: CrossOver has been, in our humble opinion, a wild success. We have just crossed the 10,000 mark -- that's 10,000 unique customers; the total number of installed seats is much higher, and somewhat hard to accurately assess. We haven't closed any truly large deals, but we have an exciting number of them in the pipeline.
Lehrbaum: How much of the 'magic' accomplished by CrossOver Office is due to WINE, in general, and how much due to unique software functions provided by CodeWeavers' CrossOver product? And what sort of software functions are those?
White: Well, I think the magic is one part Wine, one part new effort on Wine, and then the most important part: spit and polish. Technical people tend to disregard the little details, but we feel that that is the most important thing we do. When you use CrossOver, the icons for Word just appear on your menu, right where you want them. And, if you email us with a problem, we fix your problem, on your computer, as fast as we can. No excuses about this or that distro; we try to make it simple and easy for our customers. Period.
Lehrbaum: Anything else interesting you'd like to add...?
White: Actually, I did want to let you know that this marks a personal landmark for me. When I started on this, over 4 years ago, I put a stick in the ground and said: "When my wife can run Quicken on Linux, I will have succeeded." So, I guess I can retire . . . [grins]
Lehrbaum: Thank you very much!
Return to Part 1 . . .
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