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Putting Novell's SuSE Purchase In Perspective
An anonymous reader writes "
The editors over at NewsForge.com have combined their efforts to put today's big news about Novell's purchase of SUSE in perspective: what the news means in business terms and to the Linux community, today and in the future. A good read that includes quotes from industry insiders, IRC inhabitants, and NewsForge.com readers."
Another reader writes "This is a good analysis piece about how Linux has become Novell's lifeline, especially since NetWare's been dying...and post-Ximian."
Well it is great that Novell has embraced linux big time but whether it is late or not is yet to be seen. Recent SCO drama does not seem to have affected Novell's plans, which is good since it shows positive signs that they are not too concerned about SCO lawsuits. One thing Novell should do is to make sure that they continue devlopment on Mono. Why? because this may encourage more developers to work on it which means more application for Unix/Linux. Remember that Windows is not the reason people still use it but it is because of the application which run on it .It also makes the life of the developer easy since maintaining two versions of source code is huge headache.
In all fairness I doubt they could've whipped this buyout together that quickly. There must've been months of negotiations.
The RedHat thing might've played into the timing of the announcement, but I'm sure they would've done it either way.
They have always been relevent to the people who have worked with NetWare and understand why it's such a great NOS. But, PHB's have forced them to move towards Linux, because all their fancy PHB Monthly magazines are telling CxO's to go with Linux.
The Corp IT public doesn't trust you all that much, and you've already got a lot of explaining to do.
... die. They let their flagship directory services get overly complex and .. die. They bought several other companies that they also kind of let .. die. So Novell is respected, but not trusted. What Novell product would you roll out today? I can't think of one.
Novell is regarded by Corporate IT as a pretty confused (although formerly mighty) company. But definitely regarded as one who let their flagship server platform kind of
Now two years ago a sudden interest in becoming part of the Linux movement, "enabling" people.
I am sorry to see that SuSE did not try for the American market on their own - I think they could have made it - they have great engineering and commitment - everyone knows their support of KDE but does everyone here know that between 1995-1997 they supported XFree creation of video drivers with lots of time and money - when this process was in its infancy - I'm talking about the days here when you had to have one of 5 or 6 specific cards to run X decently?
I am guessing that SuSE thinks Novell can help them into the American market because of their contacts and longevity. I think SuSE could have done better - I don't get it - they are already working with IBM on s390 platform!!
Technically (well, OK, from a marketing perspective more than anything), the only platforms NDS ever ran on were NetWare, Windows, and Solaris.
eDirectory is the current directory product; Linux support was added around the release of eDirectory 8.5 if memory serves.
There's also (at least) DirXML, NetMail, and soon the NetWare Services for Linux (currently in open beta).
And then there's the whole training thing - the Certified Linux Engineer program has been in the works for some time (heck, it was announced at BrainShare 2003 in April).
I think it's safe to say that Novell is "betting the farm" on its Linux future. All the signs are there - so if they don't do a good job pulling it all together, the company won't survive this. I seriously doubt this will be another WordPerfect-type acquisition.
This was during the switch from MS-DOS apps to Windows apps. Wordperfect, like several other publishers, came out late with Windows apps that were bloated and wern't that good (Lotus 123 and dBase are more examples of really bad transitions to Windows).
Novell then gathered up some of these apps, rewrote some of them, and made 'PerfectOffice' - a half-way decent office suite. Unfortunately, by this time, MS had already taken over most of the market with Office...
Did anyone outside of RedHat know that they (RH) were going to drop the RHL product line?
It seems to me that a deal like this SuSE deal would've been in the works for some time (lwn reported something about a failed purchase attempt a couple weeks ago), and that RH's decision is unlikely to have been a factor in this acquisition.
It's easy to see how the timing of the two announcements could be seen as being related, but if you look at it from a business perspective, I don't think it's anything more than coincidence that they happened on the same day.
That's not to say that Novell might do things a little differently down the road as a result of the news from RedHat.
If you had RTFA you would know that 80% of the Fortune 500 runs Netware in some capacity. The features Netware offers aren't really all that usefull for small companies (other than reliability) but there is nothing better for large enterprises.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Corel was a different issue. Corel tried to go from commercial graphics house to a quazi open source company while trying to directly compete with MS for retail OS shelf space and could not pull it off.
.
Suse and Ximian have great code, experience etc, and are moving from a profitable open source company to another company that may or may not understand open source
If there is a major infestation of PHBs in Novell's future, it will not hurt the distro.
They just pack up the source code and move on, creating a "New SuSe" or "Ximian2" The code is free, Novell only owns the names.
My bad, re: ISO's. They should still litter the landscape with these things though. Really, what would be the cost? Then consider the benefit. The live CD's seem to be the best-held secret in the Linux community. Yeah, they're useful for figuring out if a distro runs on your hardware and so on, but their utility in evangelizing for Linux has gong nearly untapped as far as I can tell.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Netware is a great & stable network operating system but difficult for developers compared to Windows. So Novell can hook into the Open Source community and get access to the largest base of developers
With Novell's global support & partners they can provide a very nice alternative.
A eDirectory enabled distributed network of Netware X servers (SUSE) with Desktop X workstations (Ximian) all kept up to date with ZenWorks X (Red Carpet) would be a nice solution for a lot of companies.
ps I'm trademarking those product names! ;-)
Cheers
VikingBrad
Is anybody else worried that this might turn into another Corel?
If Novell's got problems keeping up in terms of IT relevence as it is with its own core product, it could be really nasty if some of that starts to rub off on Suse and Ximian.
Not woried at all. Novell is succesful. Not in the same way it once was with NetWare, but certainly sucessful with products such as eDirectory and DirXML.
Sure NetWare server market share fell in favor of Windows NT. But, Novell switched gears. They are now less of a server player and more a enterprise solutions provider. Servers are fast becoming a commodity. Even if Novell had retained NetWare market share, moves like these would still be required to maintain a diversified customer base. (Unless, you're a monopoly of course.)
While Novell does not enjoy large market share in the small to medium-size market. They have remained a player in the Fortune 1000 and above.
Strange thing this...
Everyone was convinced by Microsoft that OS/2 was going to be the next big thing.
Then MS stabbed IBM in the heart, dumped OS/2 development, poured it on Windows, and got Windows 3.0 out the door, just as memory and VGA based stations were getting out there in mass.
So, WordPerfect and everyone else had apps ready to go on OS/2, and Microsoft had apps ready to run on Windows. Still, Word sucked, and Excel wasn't much better.
So, next move in the monopoly game...bundle.
MS bundled Office Pro with every station coming from Gateway, Dell, Northgate etc. Office went from 20% of the market to 90%+ in a few years. This was the final nail in WP/Lotus/Corel et. al.
When MS had near complete domanance in Office suites, suddenly, Office Pro wasn't bundled any more. Then you got Small business. Then SB light. Look at the cost of MS Office over the years. It's lots more expensive than it was.
Sure, it was cheap for a while, but that's usually how a monopoloy works. Sell at a loss to drive the competition to sell or leave. When they're gone, crank up the price and recoup your losses and more.
The market will eventually prevail. It's just VERY slow, and can be manipulated for long periods of time. The sad part is the endless string of bodies left behind. For some of us, protection from ruthless monopolists like MS is more than reason enough to short-circuit the "market."
Cheers,
Greg
No that'll piss people off.
The reason people get pissed off by AOL is because a) AOL is crap, and b) they've already received at least a dozen AOL CD's (and they figured out AOL was crap back at CD #1.)
Most people don't even understand what Linux is. I helped one person with her computer and she kept calling the thing Windows, as in "I checked to see if the keyboard was connected to Windows and it was." The apartment where I live makes available to its tenants a computer station and the manager gets pissed off at all the work he has to do to keep the thing working... he asks me what he can do about it and I tell him to make people boot from a Live CD running Linux and he looks at me as if I were speaking Swahili.
Boot his computer from a CD -- without changing a thing on his existing installation -- and he understands immediately. Explain how a million people can use that CD and he'll never have to worry about thirteen-year-olds planting viruses or sweet-little-old-ladies who decide to save each and every single picture from Sears' website to the desktop and he gets it, immediately.
Just put the word "Games" on the CD, and you'll have half of America running Linux tomorrow.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
... but it occurs to me that many of you youngsters may never have worked with Novell products at all.
If they have preserved their technical culture through the last eight or ten years, then Novell is likely to be a very, very good fit with Linux. Netware was always clumsy and arcane to administer, at least at first; the learning curve was steep. (sound familiar?) But once you understood it, you could see WHY they had done it the way they did, and their solutions were often brilliant. In exchange for up-front learning curve, you got power under the hood. (sound familiar?)
Windows was all sexy and nice-looking, and it was a lot easier to administer up front, but it didn't have anywhere NEAR the depth of thought behind it. As of NT 4.0, Microsoft's first real competition to Netware, things like print services were a joke. You could share a printer, sure, but what if you wanted to share a pool of printers? What if you wanted an automatic fallback to a backup printer that wasn't ordinarily in the pool? What if you wanted to share the same printer across several print queues? Even several print POOLS? With Novell, any of these things were easily possible, though they did take some time to get set up. (arcane, remember?) Things like this were just flat not possible on NT 4. I'm not sure they're doable even NOW, to be honest. And Microsoft introduced Active Directory, to great fanfare, with Windows 2000; Novell had Novell Directory Services something like FIVE YEARS BEFORE. It seemed to me that NDS was, as usual, better thought out and more powerful, but when I was looking at AD, my NDS experience was several years out of date, so that could be mistaken. (I never got much past beginner-level with either directory service, FWIW.)
At any rate, the buzz in the NT 4.0 timeframe was all about "application services". This was shorthand for "you can write and run your own server software", which was very difficult to do on Netware. Netware was an EXTREMELY closed architecture. If they have retained that mindset, that's going to be the biggest likely sticking point. Windows was more open and cheaper, so it prospered, just as Linux is completely open and cheaper still. Novell may have a hard time with this issue.
At any rate, Netware servers were nearly uncrashable. It could happen: I had one customer who could crash his server just by running a particular application. But by and large, you could literally install Netware on a PC, put it in the closet, and forget about it for five years. Or longer. It would just run and run and run and always work and never break. I'm DEAD SERIOUS when I say "five years uptime"; Novell reliability made even Linux look kind of amateurish. You could pretty much expect that once you turned off the monitor and left the room, that the server would continue to run until the hardware broke. It was that good.
Assuming they've preserved their technical culture , Novell probably knows more about reliability than any other living x86 software company. And they had this directory services stuff figured out six or eight years ago. They've had a lot of time to think about that problem. I've also heard good things about ZenWorks, though I haven't touched it myself.
This could be very good indeed. I'm seriously thinking about downloading SuSE now; I know it's not going to change over the short term, but if the marriage comes off (and, mind you, MOST tech company takeovers fail), LinuxWorks could become the de facto standard within a few years.
No, this is aimed at more the Enterprise, rather than consumer based software...Corel Linux was before its time and as others have mentioned Microsoft.
LSB is very likely to continue as SuSE was one of the first adopters of it, but LSB will not bring in more sales staff or profit. I may try calling Novell or emailing them about the LSB as I am sure Novell could push this more strongly.
IBM gave $50m, to me this is just a nod of approval to the deal.
Really no comparison to this and Corel.
StarTux
Agree wholeheartedly with the comment you made about reliability as I have first hand experience of that sort of uptime in a past life.
;)
The thing that let Novell down was the quality of third party software running as part of Netware "NLM" Netware loadable modules.
Interbase 4.0 (or was it 3.0) could reliably ABEND (terminate with extreme prejudice for all you youngsters) just by sending "prepare" twice on the same query using Delphi 1. Took me 4 tries before I realised that was the cause... We did get our development server within a week though
Also I once spent a highly productive TWO DAYS sitting around watching two CNEs trying to install Oracle 7.2 on Netware 4.1. Arcane doesn't begin to describe the pain those guys went through. I finally got to do my DBA stuff at 16:30 on day 2 - it took me less than an hour...
Happy days...
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