Novell: Fighting Microsoft's FUD machine

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That may have been true in the 90's...

I remember dealing with CNE's in the 80's and 90's when they would charge me astronomical rates when in the end I was more knowledgeable than they were; I have no love for Novell. However, Novell may have learned a few lessons since their fall from market dominance. I am sure that the people that were responsible for Novell's prior behavior have since slithered away to some other career.

I think the point that concerns me is true functionality and ease of use. Linux never works out of the box without some tweaking, there is never any case where I can install Linux without the development tools as I always seem to need to fix something in the distribution. I am able to deploy Linux machines as simple file servers, email servers and firewalls, but it is going to be a long long time before I can sell anyone on using Linux for their desktop when they need to interoperate with the outside world. Many of the Office clones are not 100% compatible with MS Office. Mono, while a great idea does not work that well (yes I have the most current version, I installed it yesterday). At the present time, Java is a 100% better choice for x-platform development if that sort of thing appeals to you. On MS platforms .NET blows Java out of the water, given that most machines run a Microsoft OS Mono is an interesting curiosity and a hacker's toy but hardly needed and Java is immaterial. This is not the case of Novell software being complex or being expensive to maintain, difficult for the enduser to use. This is the case that Linux is all of those things to the common end user, without a Linux Zeolot on staff the normal end user will find themselves back to the expensive and fustrating CNE experience that we had in the 80's and 90's.

I think that the point of all these OSS packages is to emulate MS products in order to gain market share and Novell has a portfolio full of almost and maybe products. Novell is a threat to SCO, but Gates and Ballmer are still not losing sleep over Linux and that is not going to change for quite a while.

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

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