Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine

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Pan gloss over

The article's primary theme is, "All's for the best in this best of all [open source] worlds." Okay; they'd hardly say they're looking at disaster and flinching.

But a few points are interesting:

Quoting:
Patrick: The public sector has more things driving decisions politically. I think that a lot of countries like the fact that Linux is an open platform and they can hire their own nationals to maintain it and pour their own dollars into their own economy. Even in Munich...

A Novell employee saying that in Munich, using SuSE, they're pouring their own dollars into their own economy. He has, of course, noticed that Novell owns SuSE.
If the politicians in Munich had wanted to pour money into their own economy, they could have stuck with Microsoft, and taken advantage of the infrastructure that already existed. They've actually cost their supplier network training costs, unless they decide to go with a services provider. Like, say, that great German company IBM.
I'm not sure Munich is a great advertisement for open source, at least so far.


Another instance:
Q - ZDNet: But what about all the intensive Excel users -- the functionality isn't there in OpenOffice at the moment to support them.

Murray: That is probably the last barrier that has to fall, but the approach we have decided to take is to move to OpenOffice and port all our stuff over. Once we have broken the Microsoft Office dependency than breaking the operating-system dependency is trivial.

In other words, forget the intensive Excel users. We're going to move everyone to OpenOffice, and whatever they suffer, tough.
This is not a reassuring model for open source trials, though there's a good chance that it may be widespread. We may be looking at users and IT becoming natural enemies again.


Here's another example of ignoring the question:
Q (ZDNet): Do you think the more zealous elements of the Linux community, who regard the Linux or Windows debate as some idealistic struggle, have scared away some potential corporate customers?
Patrick: No, the biggest IT company in the world is IBM and it hasn't scared them off.

The question is, do Linux fanatics frighten corporate types in companies which might be potential buyers.
The answer is IBM is willing to exploit volunteer labor, the more fanatic the better.
Non-responsive.

In the saying more than you thought department:

Murray: You take a small start-up with heavy Web-services architecture, used to collaborating on the Net, and you have a relatively staid enterprise software development methodology on the other side. The first thing you think is that they are going to mix together like oil and water. In the reality it has been just the opposite. It's like all this young blood has gone into revitalizing certain engineering groups.

Ever seen the description of what happened after the AOL/Time Warner merger?
All the AOL type new blood came in thinking they were going to shake up the stolid Time Warner types. The hatred engendered has lasted from that day to this.
If Novell's strategy does not work and quickly, expect human sacrifices to get at some of that new blood.

Is this bloodletting going to happen?
Well, from the comments, looks like a reasonable chance:

Patrick: We had a number of very bright open-source engineers with visions of getting Linux deployed but at a certain point we realized that as a start-up we weren't going to be able to get this deployed enterprise wide and globally.

In other words, lacking the size, resources, experience. So they combine with a company that has never done anything with this software.
What do you get? A small company inside a big company, asking for help. And feeling entitled to demand it.
How convivial are the staff meetings at Novell?

Posted by: Anton Philidor   Posted on: 06/24/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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