
Novell to Los Angeles: Drop Dead - adambyrtek
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20091031/tc_pcworld/novelltolosangelesdropdead
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holdenk
Personally I think this is more a case study in how not to do PR. We have a
company (well city) announce they are moving to a competitors product. Do you
1)Give them a call and try and see if the relationship can be salvaged?
2)Failing that allow them to go ahead with the migration, but let them know
should they decide compelling featutre you offer is important, you'd be more
than willing to help them migrate back to your offering in the future OR Write
a press release, suggesting that your customer is making a bad decision?

To me, it seems that criticizing a past customer based on there choice to use
another service provider is simple bone-headed. I mean you can say these
things internally, but to publish a press release?

~~~
butterfi
I completely agree, Novell's press release sounds like a whiny child.

The release says "To set the record straight, Novell GroupWise is a world-
class product..." Did anyone ask this question? They come across as very
defensive, which frankly is unappealing in a vendor.

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spitfire
Novell has been in trouble for quite a few years.

Ever since they bought Suse and Ximian they've just been lost. Part of that
you can lay directly at the executives that came with the acquisitions. The
open source side of the business is schizophrenic. With Miguel De Icaza
building a clone of every new fad microsoft technology that comes along.

Not a fantastic way to build a solid, durable business.

~~~
jrockway
You can't blame de Icaza for creating excellent free software and giving it to
the community. Mono is faster than Microsoft's own VM in many benchmarks.
Novel and de Icaza have done a lot for GNOME, as well. (I don't use
traditional Linux desktops anymore, but if you use KDE and GNOME for a while,
you'll notice that GNOME is a lot less crashy compared to KDE. This is because
most of the apps are managed code, C# or Python, while KDE is all C++. It
_does_ make a difference.)

Anyway, it's not de Icaza's fault that Novel can't use their excellent
software to make money. He is just a programmer; his job is to program, not to
make Novel highly profitable.

~~~
mbreese
I have to agree and disagree with this...

On one hand, it seems like the main open source software that comes out of
Novell recently is Mono/.NET related. So, regardless of how much other stuff
they do, this is what they are known for. So, if you like Mono, you'll love
Novell. If you hate Mono, you'll dislike Novell. This doesn't seem to be much
of a middle ground in this.

According to Wikipedia, his title is VP of Developer Platform. So, his job
isn't just to program, but to bring developers in. But if he's ostracized a
large group of developers with Mono, that can't be a good thing.

So yeah, he's not on the business side, but he is management... so making
Novell profitable is part of the job description. And the effectiveness of the
strategy that Novell has taken since acquiring SuSE and Ximian is at least up
for debate. From an outside perspective, it does seem to be pretty rudderless.
Trying to merge the Ximian (GNOME) group with the SuSE (largely KDE-based)
group is a pretty good example.

That's not to say that Mono hasn't brought in some business for Novell, but
I'm not in a position to speculate on this one way or the other.

(This isn't to knock Mono or GNOME or anything else he's touched... I'm just
looking at it from a strictly business point of view. I'm pretty ambivalent on
Mono, personally).

~~~
jrockway
The only people that don't like Mono are politicians, not programmers. If you
are a programmer, it's another potential tool in your toolbox. (I am probably
not going to use it, as I prefer Haskell to F#. But I certainly don't think
there's any problem with it existing.)

~~~
hexis
Programmers might not be interested in politics, but politics are interested
in programmers.

------
CapitalistCartr
Microsoft could afford to have zero sense of direction, and innovate nothing,
as they had (have?) a defacto monopoly. No other company can afford to be so
rudder-less.

Novell has been lost at sea for years, as Spitfire says, not from lack of sail
or wind, but lack of direction. If you don't know where you're going, no wind
is a good one.

~~~
spitfire
It's funny, Novell used to own the server space lock, stock and barrel.

They had mindshare in small business owners. Think fo that! Florists knew who
Novell was. They were the guys who did the software for your backoffice
server. But they threw it all away by not innovating.

They could have continued to own the low end by continously making things
easier and building on success. Instead they're a hasbeen with a corporate
accounts only sales policy - I just tried to buy suse linux from their
website, no dice.

~~~
gaius
Indeed, I too remember when Netware was synonymous with LAN services for PCs
(file, print, auth and directory). You could even run apps on your Netware
servers using NLMs. But NLMs were tricky to write, and the OS gave you no
modern features like memory protection; the game was over when MS released NT
Advanced Server and NT 3.51 was the final nail in its coffin. All the
aformentioned LAN services, plus SQL Server. Novell failed because they got
complacent. Interestingly MS is going back to that now, Windows 2008 Server
Core Edition is a command-line only version of Windows just for file and
print...

~~~
arebop
NT 3.51 was released in May 1995 [1]. Netware 4 was released in 1993. Netware
4's big feature was NDS, a scalable directory service with an LDAP interface.
Windows got that feature in 2000. Meanwhile Novell released IntranetWare with
TCP/IP support in 1996 and Netware 5 in 1998 [2]. Netware 5 had hierarchical
storage management; support for Java, Perl, and JavaScript; and memory
protection [3].

I was pretty young then and not much of a programmer, but it certainly seemed
to me then that Novell's problems were more about business operations than
about any lack of technological progress.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.51> [2]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novell_NetWare> [3]
[http://support.novell.com/techcenter/articles/dnd19980703.ht...](http://support.novell.com/techcenter/articles/dnd19980703.html)

~~~
gaius
NTAS was also released in '93 including TCP/IP and memory protection[1].

Complacency's a funny thing; it can sneak up on you. I'm sure Joe Novell
Programmer was doing great work polishing features Netware already had and Jo
Novell Manager was proud of how many happy customers she had. They just didn't
foresee that people wanted a general-purpose OS on their departmental/LAN
servers (not least because it makes developing server apps easier).

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1>

