Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine

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Stating the obvious...

I think the most interesting part of this article was how there was so little content that was newsworthy that the "grab" of the story was the "revolutionary" idea that to get traction in an enterprise desktop space, you have to overcome Microsoft Office. Well, duh!!!

Good luck to Novell and the others, their efforts are helping enterprise customers everywhere drive down the price of their Microsoft licensing deals. For the first time in a long time you actually have some leverage when dealing with Microsoft and in return they are succumbing to that competitive pressure.

However to say that government IT is leading the way of the future is wishful thinking in the extreme. Government departments are not known for making great technology decisions and then backing that up with the dollars to make it work.

The one problem that is coming to the attention of the enterprise space is the diverging variants of "enterprise" Linux. Red Hat Enterprise AS Linux is a good example. You can't download it for free and in fact the price of AUD$3750 per year for the subscription is actually about 30% higher than Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edtn with Software Assurance over the same 3 year time frame. Each of the big Linux builds are coming out with their own "enterprise" Linux build which will have proprietary tools and will come at a cost.

Personally, I think that's great because those companies now have a legitimate business model. This does however destroy this Novell arguement that Linux will catch up in the management tools space which should reduce the cost of deploying Linux. These Linux "enterprise" distributions are now competing with each other as well as Microsoft so they are not going to Open Source their toolsets. Microsoft is not standing still in the area of Systems Management either so it essentially comes down to who has the best people with the best ideas, the most customer experience and the most money to actually do the R&D and deliver the vision. You would be hard pressed to suggest that Novell are going to gain some epiphany from deploying 6,000 Linux seats in an IT organisation that will propel them to understand customer deployment pain more deeply than Microsoft which gets feedback daily from millions of customers.

I think the position of the two interviewees shows the somewhat immaturity of that market segment. That's not to cast any bad light on their products, what they've achieved to date or what they are trying to do. They just have an unjustified arrogance about them. I mean, they talk about "changing" the staid Novell or the ever insightful "breaking Office is the key" comment. Large organisations have spent millions of dollars training staff in Office and Windows and they have the benefit of their staff almost certainly having the same products at home. The whole desktop issue in the enterprise has to do with efficiency of transition for the user base, cost of support and mitigating risk. When a Linux vendor starts talking about those issues specifically, more people in the Enterprise will stop piloting and start deploying.

Posted by: SuperSean   Posted on: 06/23/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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