Editing SCO Group (section)

=== Mobility and Me Inc. ===
[[Image:SCO Group offices in Murray Hill NJ April 2006.jpg|thumb|left|SCO's Murray Hill, New Jersey office building, as taken in 2006 by a Palm Treo 650 smartphone being used for some of the Me Inc. development work being done there]]

The SCO Group's biggest initiative to find a new software business came with what it called Me Inc., first announced at a [[DEMO conference]] in California in September 2005.<ref name="dn-meinc">{{cite news | author-first=Brice | author-last=Wallace | title=Network Platform Unveiled by SCO | newspaper= Deseret News | date=September 20, 2005 | url= https://www.proquest.com/docview/351405599 | id={{ProQuest|351405599}} | via=ProQuest}}</ref>

Me Inc. sought to capitalize on the emergence of [[smartphone]]s in that it would provide both [[mobile app]]s that would run on the  phones and an architecture involving a network "edge processor" that would offload processing and storage from the phones themselves and handle authentication, session management, and aggregation of data requests.<ref name="dn-meinc"/><ref name="sdt-meinc"/>  In such an approach, Me Inc. represented a hosted [[software as a service]] (SaaS) offering,<ref name="sdt-meinc"/> with the edge processor representing what would later become referred to as both [[edge computing]] and mobile backend as a service. Some of the engineering effort behind Me Inc. came from former Vultus staff, following the failure of the prior SCOx efforts to find a market.<ref name="iwk-meinc"/>  Me Inc. initially targeted the [[Palm Treo]] line of smartphones.<ref name="sdt-meinc"/>  Subsequent support was put into place for the [[Windows Mobile]] line of smartphones and some others.<ref name="iwk-meinc"/><ref name="sdt-meinc"/>

The first services from Me Inc. were Shout, in which users could broadcast text or voice messages from a phone to large groups; Vote, in which users could post surveys to large groups and quickly receive a tally back; and Action, in which users could post tasks for others to do and monitor their statuses.<ref name="dn-meinc"/>  An early user of the Shout service was [[Utah State University]], which used it for broadcasting messages to members of its sports booster organization.<ref name="dn-meinc"/>  Me Inc. services were subsequently used by other Utah organizations as well, including the [[Utah Jazz]], the [[BYU Cougars]], and Mayor of Provo [[Lewis Billings]].<ref name="kr-meinc"/>

In February 2006, SCO announced that the edge processor had the product name EdgeClick.<ref name="kr-meinc">{{cite news | author-last=Mims | author-first=Bob | title=SCO Group Unveils New Links for Computers | agency= Knight Ridder Tribune Business News | date= February 28, 2006 | url= https://www.proquest.com/docview/461331743 | id={{ProQuest|461331743}} | via=ProQuest}}</ref>  The development environment for it was branded the EdgeBuilder SDK.<ref name="slt-ride"/>  In addition, a website <code>EdgeClickPark.com</code> was announced, that would act as an Internet ecosystem for the development and selling of mobile applications and services.<ref name="kr-meinc"/>  As SCO marketing executive Tim Negris said, the idea of EdgeClickPark was to provide a mechanism for "individuals and organizations of all kinds to participate in developing, selling and using digital services."<ref name="kr-meinc"/>  Many of these services would come not from SCO itself but from SCO partners, resellers, and ISVs,<ref name="sdt-edgeclick"/> a channel it was familiar with from  the original SCO era.<ref name="sdt-edgeclick"/>  This was reminiscent of McBride's goal for the pre-lawsuits SCOBiz and the post-lawsuits SCO Marketplace Initiative, and McBride had similarly large ambitions for Me Inc. and EdgeClickPark, envisioning it having the same role for mobile software that [[iTunes]] had at the time for digital music.<ref name="iwk-meinc"/>

McBride, who had been looking at various new business opportunities for SCO to enter, saw the company's mobility initiative as something that could become a big success in both the business and consumer spaces, saying "We don't know for sure, but we have a little bit of a spark in our eyes that this will be a big deal."<ref name="dn-meinc"/>  The SCO Group's chief technology officer, Sandy Gupta, stated that for the company,  "this is clearly a big switch in paradigm."<ref name="slt-ride"/>  Industry analysts thought that Me Inc. was aimed at something there was clearly a large market for.<ref name="iwk-meinc"/>  As one said, "The operating system market is an increasingly difficult place to compete. SCO Group really does need more diversity [and] these recent pushes represent significant diversification of their product portfolio."<ref name="slt-ride"/> ''Software Development Times'' commended SCO for coming up with the EdgeClickPark idea, saying that it showed an "interesting flair" in providing a place for partnerships and business development.<ref name="sdt-edgeclick">{{cite news | title=Editorials: The Two Sides of SCO | magazine=Software Development Times  | date=June 1, 2006 | page= 32 | url= https://www.proquest.com/docview/232480079 | id={{ProQuest|232480079}} | via=ProQuest}}</ref>  The company also undertook the proposing of customized mobile applications for various businesses and organizations, using the Me Inc. platform as a starting point.<ref>{{cite news | url=https://www.eweek.com/mobile/sco-ventures-into-mobile-device-applications/ | title=SCO Ventures into Mobile Device Applications | author-first=Steven J. | author-last=Vaughan-Nichols | date=September 19, 2005 | magazine=eWeek}}</ref>

However, the SCO Group being able to succeed in these efforts faced somewhat long odds, in part due to their being up against many kinds of competition in the mobile space and in part due to the negative feelings about SCO that their campaign against Linux had engendered.<ref name="iwk-meinc">{{cite news | url=https://www.informationweek.com/software/this-time-sco-offers-mobile-web-services-not-lawsuits | title=This Time, SCO Offers Mobile Web Services, Not Lawsuits | author-first=Larry | author-last=Greenemeier | work=InformationWeek | date=September 23, 2005 }}</ref>
Nevertheless, it was all viewed as a positive development; as ''[[Software Development Times]]'' summarized in a subheading, "Strategy shift to mobile seen as better 'than suing people'".<ref name="sdt-meinc">{{cite news | author-last=Correia | author-first= Edward J. | title=SCO Presents a New Me to Market | magazine= Software Development Times | date=October 15, 2005 | page= 27 | url= https://www.proquest.com/docview/232485486 | id= {{ProQuest|232485486}} | via=ProQuest}}</ref>

[[Image:SCO Forum 2006 stage and mobility theme.jpg|thumb|right|"Mobility Everywhere" was the theme of SCO Forum 2006]]

SCO's mobility initiative was a main theme of the 2006 instance of its SCO Forum conference,<ref name="crn-2006"/> held at [[The Mirage]] in Las Vegas. McBride said, "Today is the coming out party for Me Inc. Over the next few years, we want to be a leading provider of mobile application software to the marketplace. ... This is a seminal moment for us."<ref name="crn-2006">{{cite news | url=https://www.crn.com/news/networking/193000193/sco-on-the-go-with-mobile-saas-platform.htm | title=SCO On The Go With Mobile SaaS Platform | author-first=Paula | author-last=Rooney | publisher=CRN | date=September 15, 2006}}</ref>  The Forum 2006 schedule, subtitled "Mobility Everywhere", held some nineteen different breakout and training sessions related to Me Inc. and EdgeClick, compared to twenty-six sessions for operating system related topics.<ref>SCO Forum 2006 Schedule.</ref>  Eager to drum up interest in the EdgeClick infrastructure and to get developers to attend the 2006 instance of SCO Forum, McBride offered a prize to the developer of the best application built from the EdgeBuilder SDK: a [[BMW M5#E60/E61 M5 (2004–2010)|507-horsepower, V10-engined BMW M5 sports sedan]].<ref name="slt-ride">{{cite news | author-last=Mims | author-first=Bob | title=SCO Group Offers a Nice Ride for New Mobile Tech Ideas | newspaper= The Salt Lake Tribune | date= June 20, 2006 | url=https://www.proquest.com/docview/282124016 | id={{ProQuest|282124016}} | via=ProQuest}}</ref>

One new mobility offering, HipCheck, which allowed the remote monitoring and administration of business-critical servers on smartphones, was given its debut announcement and demonstration at Forum.<ref name="nw-2006">{{cite news | url=https://www.networkworld.com/article/2305686/sco-aims-to-reinvent-itself-through-mobility.html | title=SCO aims to reinvent itself through mobility | author-first=Elizabeth | author-last=Montalbano | agency=IDG News Service | magazine=Network World | date=August 7, 2006}}</ref>  The HipCheck service, which gave system administrators the ability to conduct secure actions from their phone to correct some kinds of server anomalies or respond to user requests such as resetting passwords,<ref name="bb-hipcheck"/> was officially made available in October 2006, with support for monitoring agents running on various levels of Windows and Unix systems.<ref>{{cite press release | title=SCO Ships HipCheck Mobile Service for Proactive Mobile Administration of Servers and PCs | publisher= PR Newswire | date=October 5, 2006 | url=https://www.proquest.com/docview/451098282 | id= {{ProQuest|451098282}} | via=ProQuest}}</ref>  Several upgrades to HipCheck were subsequently made available.<ref name="bb-hipcheck">{{cite press release | url=https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2007-05-24/sco-announces-new-release-of-hipcheck-tm-with-expanded-mobile | title=SCO Announces New Release of HipCheck(TM) with Expanded Mobile | publisher=Business Wire | date=May 24, 2007}}</ref>

Developed by SCO for [[FranklinCovey]], a Utah-based company that had a line of paper-based planning and organizational products, FCmobilelife was an app for handling personal and organizational task and goal management.<ref name="slt-fcml">{{cite news | url=https://archive.sltrib.com/story.php?ref=/ci_13273255 | title=In Utah, we have an app for that | author-first=Tom | author-last=Harvey | newspaper=The Salt Lake Tribune | date=September 9, 2009 }}</ref>  (In 2006, SCO had been building a similar app for [[Day-Timer]] named DT4,<ref>{{cite news | title=SCO Tries New Tack | newspaper=The Salt Lake Tribune | date= August 7, 2006 | url=https://www.proquest.com/docview/282084799 | via=ProQuest | author-first=Bob | author-last=Mims| id={{ProQuest|282084799}} }}</ref> but that collaboration fell through.)  In particular, the FCmobilelife app emulated FranklinCovey's methodologies for planning and productivity.<ref name="ub-fcml"/>  Initial versions were released for the [[Windows Mobile]] and [[BlackBerry]] phones;<ref name="mdl-fcml">{{cite news | url=https://www.marketingdive.com/ex/mobilemarketer/cms/news/commerce/2725.html | title=Planning products brand FranklinCovey organizes mobile strategy | author-first=Mickey Alam | author-last=Khan | publisher=Marketing Dive | access-date=December 25, 2021}}</ref> an app for the [[iPhone]] was released in mid-2009.<ref name="ub-fcml">{{cite news | title=Salt Lake City | publisher= Utah Business | date= May 2009 | page=12 | via= Gale General OneFile <!--(accessed December 25, 2021).--> | url= https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A201865718/ITOF?u=wikipedia&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f6e1aed9}}</ref>

In October 2008, during [[SCO Tec Forum 2008]], the last Forum ever held, the SCO Mobile Server platform was announced, which was a bundling of the Edgeclick server-side functionality and Me Inc. client development kit on top of a UnixWare 7 or Openserver 6 system.<ref name="bb-scoms">{{cite press release | url=https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2008-10-20/sco-announces-availability-of-sco-mobile-server-sdk | title=SCO Announces Availability of SCO Mobile Server SDK | publisher=PR Newswire | date=October 20, 2008}}</ref>  By then UnixWare itself, the company's flagship product, had not seen a new release in some four years.<ref name="ars-2008-0"/>

In the end, despite the company's efforts, the mobile services offerings did not attract that much attention or revenues in the marketplace.<ref name="ars-2008-0"/>