Kanosis Postmortem

I have not posted here for a while. Simply put, after Kanosis launched on May 1st, 2006 and obviously was not delivering what they promised, I decided to hold off and see if the ship would right itself. It did not, things steadily spun out of control with a management which seemed occupied mainly with blaming each other for the failures of the company, and could not re-group after that disastrous launch. Granted, some mistakes were made which were not easy to overcome, most notably with the third-party payment system, to be provided by Uniclear, which should never have been used in the first place if anyone had bothered to do due diligence on that company, for even by casual observation it was clear they did not have the wherewithal to perform at the levels Kanosis would have required.

And so it goes. Axiasoft appears to be working on other releases of the technology, which I still think holds promise, though I would assume that Kanosis as a business entity is irreparably compromised. Timing is everything, and I still think that if the technology and the marketing could have synched up a bit better, this company could have succeeded spectacularly and made history. Right now it would probably take a lot of money and an extremely competent management to make it happen, but in the meantime the field might have become too crowded.

Some cowardly anonymous recently posted the September 22 announcement of insolvency by Kanosis management as a response to one of my posts here. The text of that document reflects some of the facts, but also the underlying management problem. The "majority ownership" of the company even in a public document takes no responsibility for the fact that they were not apparently in control of the Kanosis finances during the launch period, and they adduce that claim in their defense, instead of taking responsibility for it. All of this leaves little hope that in anything close to its current form the company could ever succeed, never mind how good the software is.

Besides the bitter disappointment, the Kanosis experience however has inspired me to look further into this area, which I think is the absolute key to the future. Not only is it thin clients etc., but it's secure personal computing, and never again personal computers. A cell phone maybe, but not a computer. Use those boxes for doorstops, unless you absolutely must have one. Windows Vista in my modest view is an exercise in pointlessness. Nobody needs it. The world has moved on, and it ain't a Microsoft Windows world any longer, Windows mobile on phones will die out sooner rather than later.


Copyright © 2006 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.