Why Novell is like Napster-era Metallica
Remember back when Metallica isolated the majority of their fan base with their over-the-top stance against Napster (for the moment let's leave the stupidity of the music business and the fact that it only has itself to blame for people pirating songs out of this) and what it did to the band and the fans that supported them for all those years? That's how I am starting to think of Novell.
Metallica went from being loved by millions to being whiny about Napster, taking the focus of the band off the music and onto the ugly business of the music industry. Ultimately, instead of proving a point, the argument took on a sheen of greed. This made people not like the band.
Drawing a parallel to Novell, the company went from being a player in the Linux market, to an open source pariah as the focus changed from the software to their pact with Microsoft. Add to that the fact that Novell handled the situation rather poorly (with more obnoxious details filtering out all the time) and you find a company that lost its way. The big question if Novell can turn the ship all the way.
When we look at the market dynamics facing Novell it's fairly obvious why Novell did the deal with Microsoft:- Red Hat has a dominant position for Linux servers with Ubuntu taking the desktop
- NetWare is pretty much dead
- Chronic management changes drained the corporate brain trust
- Microsoft needed to make a deal with a Linux vendor and Novell was desperate while Red Hat is not.
Onto the crux of the problem: Metallica's music has stood the test of time, while Novell's software has not. Metallica's last album when James was finally off the booze was better than the last release of Netware. Even with the new virtualization functions of Netware (Brad makes some good points) it just doesn't matter. Novell has already missed pretty much every chance it had for a true resurgence.
Dave Rosenberg dishes up "Software, Interrupted" with nearly 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to multiple start-up IPOs to open-source enterprise software companies. He is co-founder of MuleSource and currently serves as the general manager of Hardy Way. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can contact Dave via e-mail at softwareinterrupted@gmail.com.
But ... Novell is a very bad company. They basically have no clue, really about any aspect of the industry. They are trying hard and doing some good things with SUSE ... but they really don't "get" that they need to be a fully OSS company. They really, just, don't get ... much of anything. Either they need to open source NCP, NSS, and FLAIM (ie EVERYTHING) or, they need to be bought up by some private investor. Get OUT of the publicly traded company biz. And if that happens, probably it would be the proprietary stuff split off from the OSS stuff.
<sigh> It really is too bad, because there was so much potential, but we have known that for nearly 10 years and they still have yet to make the potential into an actual biz plan.
This means nothing to wooly-jumpered geeks still living with their parents and trying out the latest fads in the distro world, but having things work together well in windows/linux land is damned important to a lot of us.
Look, I have to live in a world where there's competition, and so do all of you commenters and pundits. You can carp and harp about how Novell should get out of the business and just die once and for all, but who really cares what you think?
Go Novell, don't listen to the nay-sayers, keep on making SUSE better and more friendly to subscribe and use, and don't let these bastards grind you down.
XM