Tabriz Agentware is a product of General Magic -- for the last few months you could actually order evaluation copies of the "Active Web Tools" from General Magic for the Sun, SGI, and HP (I'm sitting here looking at a copy).
I don't know specifically what agreement might have been made with Sprynet; but I do know that in the Conterra purchase that the web hosting side of Conterra was purchased (while the strict ISP side was left alone). Conterra was doing a pretty good business web hosting from what I understand -- their biggest client was "Hootie and the Blowfish" with their web site. My guess is that General Magic is going to use Web hosting to try to penetrate the market with their intelligent agent tools. Not a bad strategy -- intelligent agent tools are kinda like "middleware" in that they don't show up to the end user but are instead embedded in other applications and used mostly indirectly.
The problem I see for General Magic is that there is a fast-growing number of providers of "intelligent agent software". While General Magic's stuff may be better (I haven't and won't have time to do a formal evaluation), the competition is heating up. Thus I don't think that they can win on technology alone, or even primarily technology.
With this in mind, I think that the number of strategic relationships, and the quality of those relationships, are of paramount importance to General Magic's future.
Bottom line: at this point, I'm not buying -- but then again, I'm a fairly conservative technology investor who looks for things like low P/E ratios and past consistent growing earning growth. Thus I miss out on a lot of things like this. For another type of investor/speculator, it might be a great buy.
Mark |
