Novell to Los Angeles: Drop Dead
tech.yahoo.com
tech.yahoo.com
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
They are known for Mono only because people have been bitching and screaming about it since the project started.
Novell is having a hard time because in the business of providing support for open-source products, there's no place for number 2. If you want to buy support for a Linux distribution, you either pay for the number one, which is Red Hat, or get Cent OS or Debian, relying on the huge communities behind them.
Merging Ximian with SuSE wasn't a good idea indeed. But at the time Gnome seemed like the better choice for corporate Linux, and IMHO it still is. Red Hat was using it, it's more stable and predictable, and you wouldn't need a commercial license to develop commercial software on top of it (like KDE at that time). The acquisition I couldn't understand was SUSE.
Betting on Mono does make sense. Developers and companies using dotNet are willing to pay for their tools, for their servers, and for support. They are even paying for add-ons to their IDE (like JetBrains ReSharper). So if you want to migrate to Linux, what's the best distribution for you? SUSE of course.
Unfortunately open-source doesn't sell well. You can use it as a catalyst for your other products, you can use it to gain market-share, you can rely on a community to bring improvements to your infrastructure (when you don't have the resouces for that), but making money straight out of open-source? That's not easy.
Miguel and his team are moving in uncharted territories ... they are in the process of releasing two commercial products for Mono ... MonoTouch and Mono Tools for Visual Studio. Both are quite interesting.
The deal was that the Ximian people would help Novell out. Novell would use Ximian's software to offer complete platforms again. But, always be mindful of the suits.
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.
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.
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...
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).