Ted Haegar of Novell Open Audio fame is doing a great job addressing some of the points I raised earlier this year about the podcast. Not only is he managing to keep up his jet-setting lifestyle but in between jaunts to all four corners of the world he is managing to interview some really great Novell people like Jason Williams on the future of iFolder.
iFolder for those who don't know is an easy to use file synchronisation tool. Unfortunately iFolder is one of those (all too many) Novell products that is brilliant in concept but hasn't quite made it when it comes to execution or industry uptake. A good analogy to describe iFolder would be that of an Olympic high diver from a small ex-Soviet block state attempting a dive that would surely win the gold but because of lack of preparation, brought on by the fact they couldn't afford to practice full-time and instead were milking cows, they just don't quite pull it off when it counts.
What do I mean by this? iFolder 2 was nice but it was heavily tied into Netware, offered only a Windows client and had a restrictive usage model. iFolder 3 promised to fix these shortcomings but instead (prior to version 3.6) it seems to have lost its direction and paid the price for certain architectural decisions that in hindsight are questionable. In both cases the potential was there but the focus and determination to pull off the task seemed to wane as time progressed.