End of U3?

[Mark Wieder]

Lynn-

Saturday, May 12, 2007, 8:15:39 AM, you wrote:

> No, not exactly - only a transformation in our support for an even larger
> entity. Read the original article in Infoweek here
> http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199501108.

I tend to read things on slashdot with a healthy grain of salt (if I
may be allowed to mix metaphors thusly). Nontheless, "As part of the
plan, SanDisk will phase out its U3 technology" in both the slashdot
and the original informationweek articles seems pretty up-front. As
does "Independent software developers that (sic) have created
U3-compatible applications will be offered help migrating their
products to the new technology".

> Not all that long ago, U3 was acquired by San Disk (San Disk and M-Systems
> both owned 50% each previously; San Disk acquired M-Systems) and our
> partnership with San Disk has blossomed. We havent been able to say anything
> about this, for obvious reasons. It isnt something I can discuss in great
> detail at this point but you shouldn't automatically assume this is going to
> hose the Rev-U3 community - maybe just the opposite :-)

Is there really a "Rev-U3 community"? And whatever happened to the
promised mac compatibility? I can't see a Microsoft partnership
pushing that one forward...

...and in the eating-our-own-dogfood department, even the runrev team
never bothered updating a u3-compatible version. I admit to running
the original u3 IDE for a while, but then it got hopelessly outdated.
I have to conclude that the team decided that creating a new u3 IDE
version a) was too difficult, b) had security or other problems, or c)
wasn't worth bothering with if the platform was going to change
anyway.

I actually have three different u3 devices, none of which work with
Vista. I don't consider that much of a loss, but if I were planning to
deploy an app to a u3 platform that would probably kill my market. A
better alternative, as some of the slashdotters have also noted, is
portableapps.com.

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net