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Novell Missteps Not Affecting SuSE
OSS_ilation writes "Analysts and users agree -- if the layoff rumors at Novell prove true sometime soon, SuSE Linux has nothing to fear. Over at SearchOpenSource.com the word is that the popular SuSE Linux operating system has both the community support and technical chops to weather any personnel-related storms that may be lingering on the horizon. However, the point is also made that should Novell go south, there are those who believe SuSE could prove to be an appealing acquisition target."
I hear they're going to merge with Mandriva to form a new company, Mansuseriva, which their marketers say is just about the hippest name around.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Novell's got a billion bucks. Really. Even if they take a huge onetime charge to fire everyone they have left in Utah, they won't be dead for years.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Good to see that there is someone there to feed that chameleon.
Its better than their current name. Mandriva sounds like a gay porno.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
A much more plausible option for Novell is to factor out redundancy in their products in favor of their OSS. And to convert more of their products into OSS, either by publishing the source, or by phasing them out in favor of supporting, maybe even buying, their OSS competition. If the market thinks their OSS divisions are worth buying, it will think Novell is even better suited to keep them, if its overall strategy is consistent (and they market that strategy correctly). Novell made its empire making DOS network, almost lost it to NT's "network OS" PR, kept it by making Win32 network to old Novell standards, and generally is known for making others OSes interoperate. Novell should see the light and make the jump. They could ride the Linux tide to do what MS did with PC desktop/LANs, without that nasty (and cyclic) vendor lockin.
--
make install -not war
...but that just makes them an acquisition target. I'm still not sure that Novell's shareholders won't get together and fire the board (Jack Messman and all) before an acquiring vehicle (and it could be a VC-led consortium) does it anyway.
It takes real genius to fail to meet the market in the way Novell has, but Novell has so many failed strategies, failed relaunches, failed products that never quite delivered, that it amounts to a sort of genius.
It has too many consultants, but more importantly far too many managerial layers to ever be nimble. Novell corporately is sclerotic, and its upper management is utterly remote from the cutting edge.
SuSE wasn't making money before the acquisition, and SuSE Linux needs more corporate sponsors.
Perhaps Google should buy SuSE Linux - I'm sure Eric Schmidt would like the irony.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Outside Usa...
Also, and more importantly, those clients are used to pay. So, the SuSe offering of novell, with the tools used by novell admins, is cheaper, then they will maintain, and grouth their market share.
Also, Microsof pricing as a Network Operating System, is way more expensive than Novell offerings, and for example, a iDirectory with Identity Manager, are good solutions, and their OpenSource counterpart, needs a LOT of time to implement it correctly, lot of hack and slash, and Novell provides clients from windows/linux/mac...
So, big & medium size co, searching for a cheaper infrastructure, and wanting to still have somebody to sue, and have WorldWide support, then Novell SuSe is the way to go...
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Suse is unimportant. It's yet another linux distro, one among many, and it isn't even that different. If Suse disappeared, its users could just switch to another distro.
Mono, however, is vastly cooler and far more important than Suse, for two reasons. First, there is no open source alternative to Mono--they're actually writing something new instead of just putting together yet another distro. Second, consider Mono's impact--Mono is an implementation of the .NET CLR and C# compilers that will allow future applications written for the Microsoft platform to run seamlessly on Linux (!!). It would be difficult to overstate how important that is. Mono is a major contribution.
Novell funds both Suse and Mono. But only Mono matters. If Novell has problems (and I'm not sure they even are having problems), it shouldn't be Suse that concerns us.
Hate to say it, but the notion that troubles at Novell won't affect SUSE is complete bullshit. They need enterprise sales. The enterprise generally doesn't invest in troubled companies that might have gone down the tubes one year into a five-year support package. And that's excluding any impact on Novell Linux if a new strategy vaporizes their R&D budgets. Any long-term cloud over Novell is going to be a killer for SUSE. In Linux terms, it would be a case of no one ever went broke buying Red Hat.
That wouldn't be attractive for many companies. I mean, why change from Windows to Linux when the only credible Linux game in town is Red Hat and they want to be just like Microsoft anyway. This sounds much more like analysts talking up SUSE because they know full well that if it comes to a showdown at Novell, the Linux part is the one that will sell for decent money, if they can keep it untarnished.
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tournoun pas maï
A revitalized Novell-SUSE-Ximian combo is a massive threat to Microsoft (Hello New Zealand!) and if there are any even barely semilegal (under the current US regi... administration) wink-wink-nod-nod ways of getting the large financial firms to undermine Novell's image and finances, the goebbelsesque masterminds within the Strategic Acquisitions and Finances department of Microsoft are certainly pulling all their strings to that effect. That's their sole reason d'etre!
One recent example: When MS wanted their "Linux Powerhouse" and Office competitors Corel dead (but actually managed to buy it instead through a proxy; DOJ who?), they used ex-MS executives and their former or current colleagues and an MS-affiliated Vector Capital venture firm (financed by certain Paul Allen and operated by ex-MS execs) to do the probing, buying, insider bribing (offers of a glittery parachutes and a get-out-of-jail-free cards, anyone?), doctored "third party" evaluation of the company finances and its business projections (by top Wall St firms) etc. Even Corel's new and supposedly independently created pro-MS business strategy in 2001 was devised by a consultancy firm (McKinsey and Company) with links to people involved in the shady takeover.
Innocuous manipulation of competitors' share price (Down, boy!), or interference in competitors' corporate affairs through seemingly neutral investment houses or venture investors (Split 'em up for quick short-term profit!) is probably taking place all the time. The corporate hijacking of Corel was an amazingly outrageous maneuver, taking place as it did so soon after MS had nominally "lost" their monopoly case against the US-DOJ, and Microsoft's strategic planners certainly feel that they have even more leeway these days.
"Should Novell go south... blah blah blah?"
At the time of the MS-engineered takeover Corel was finalizing its turnaround and had loads of cash left (they were eventually bought out for a mere $30-40M for the dozen or so products!) but for some reason the larger investment firms and certain media kept referring to the company as "beleagured" (Hello Apple!), keeping up a constant stream of negative speculation. That is, of course, intended to have an effect on potential customers...
So now we have the even cash-richer Novell in the unenviable position of being a major MS competitor and yet having its "missteps" and future disembowellings spculated in the press.. But this time Novell also has some big backers (Hello Big Blue!) in its corner and I'd expect Novell to break through any glass ceilings or FUD campaigns instead of laying down its arms and capitulating before the Barbarian Gates.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Exactly how did we go from layoffs to folding?
It doesn't take much research to discover that Novell grew their business in the early 90s to the mid 90s from less then $500 million to over $2 billion. And when they hit their peak in the mid 90s they had over 7000 employees. In the late 90s Novell's business was cut in half to about $1 billion and they have held there for some time. Currently the number of employees is at 6000+ and their costs to run their business just about overwhelm their revenue. Which begs the question, does this billion dollar company have more people than are necessary to run the business? I know what the numbers say, but I'll let everyone figure it out for themselves.
The point to keep from all this, while Novell has not done a good of keeping costs under control they have done a good job of keeping their revenues up since Microsoft sucked away soo much of their business. So it is not likely Novell will be folding anytime soon and if anything they will become a leaner and more profitable company which currently has an excellent business plan point directly at the burgeoning open source market.
burnin
Zenworks is such a killer product that alone should be reason enough to stay or switch back to Novell. With Zenworks we are able to manage over 2500 computers with two that's right two administrators.
I've run novell netware servers for 9 years, and literaly NEVER had it crash. And after power outages, its never failed to come right back up online. Its the only OS i have ever run that have never given me Guru Meditation/kernel panic / BSOD / filesystem corruption. (and the opposite is just as true Stable company != Stable OS... just think of Windows)
Officially: "No comments"
It's been suggested they will follow some shareholder advice. 1. Spin-off GroupWise (a profitable product line that needs better marketing) I'm not sure it will sell as well. GroupWise needs more developers attracted which requires marketers and in-house consulting and developers. 2. Spin-off their consulting arm (which is manpower bloated since their acqusitions) which is how they got current their red headed step-child CEO. 3. Reduce head count. They have money in the bank. Their top product lines (indentity management and portal design/content management applications) are 2-3 times what the market price (very good stuff mind you) is for a "close" product match. Obviously they always have had issues in successfully marketing. Rumors fly around every 2-3 years that big blue will buy them and Redmond will crush them. It's better and easier for IBM to continue their "corporate adoption" of Novell, because it keeps Redmond from going ballistic at IBM for being parents. It's also much cheaper for IBM than nuying them. IBM is realstic in the true accounting facts: if IBM bus the company, the product prices go up. Novell needs to be smart and find ways to lower prices to make more inroads to market share, garner the support of the open-source community (which they have, but find few open-source developers savvy enough to develop for edirectory). Head count is a GREAT place to do that, seeing how they have acquired so many companies in the past few years, something has got to give. Oh, and I really hope they start picking a product name and sticking with it. Right now they change some product names every 6-9 months. Noone can sell their stuff without asking what the product is named this quarter. Probably a result of different product managers who had their own ideas at product inception. What would also help them is if they wrote connectors for edirectory to "link" to some of the better known open source projects out there (Mambo/Joomla, Nagios and the like). Then watch people at the corporate level start flocking to Suse with edirectory for web applications instead of the Redmond stuff.
This isn't FUD. Novell has been underperforming for years now. Its investors have been clamoring for massive layoffs and a major revampment. They wany Novell to sell off every thing that isn't profitable, and unless SuSE starts brining in a lot more cash, they *will* sell off that division. This isn't hard to believe either, look at Novell's history... they've always just moved from one tech to the other as each of their attempts failed. They are running out of the piles of cash aquired in the mid to late 90s and all the major investors are getting peeved.
Novell's management is one of the most disfunctional units in any major corporation, its great that they bought SuSE and all, except that they haven't done anything with the product since they've bought it. Sure they hired Nat, and he's done some cool things, but when it comes down to it, Novell is still testing the waters with Linux and right now its not looking too good for them. Don't be surprised if they sell off that unit. Last quarter they only earned 2 million dollars, and now they are spending 200 million to buyback stock and bump up their stock prices so investors are a little happier.
Investors have also already pushed Novell to sell off its consulting unit. Now they are also laying off at a minimum of 120 people in Europe. Most investment firms predict Novell will continue to underperform for sometime. Novell bought SuSE because it was on the market to be purchased and it was fairly cheap, Red Hat was offered the chance to buy SuSE first but they declined. Red Hat, unlike Novell, is riddled with major OSS advocates from the top down (i.e. the guy who wrote the first gnu c++ compiler is their VP of OSS affairs) and they believe in healthy competition, especially since with OSS everyone benefits from eachother's work, also it would have made them look bad as being a monopoly on the market. Novell saw a cheap way to test if Linux was profitable and its turning out to not be the golden goose that they needed. Novell is literally just a big mess and its been that way for over half a decade. They *can't* keep at this pace for another year or two.
Regards,
Steve
Mono is not innovative. Mono is just a misguided open source implementation of proprietary crap.
Hula (another Novell incubator project) is innovative. Hula implements integrated open standards based calendaring, scheduling, email etc. Hula doesn't copy MS API's; Hula, should it succeed, could overshadow Exchange in the collaboration software arena. To date, Exchange has had no real competition. But imagine what standards based collaboration would mean. It would be analogous to HTTP/HTML on the web, or SMTP/IMAP for email. Exchange lets you collaborate with other people in using the same Exchange server. Open standards for collaboration could allow you keep in sync with stuff going on all over the damn place. Keep in sync with your family, friends, work, community, business relationships, your kid's school, whatever. Think about it.
Bury Exchange. Long live (the bright lights at) Novell.
Businessweek has a good article regarding Novell's current difficulties.
That's bullshit about them selling off Suse.
Them getting into linux is about the ONLY thing that people ever liked about Novell in the past 5 years or so. That's it. The top management fighting with each other on actually who gets the 'credit' for pushing the movement to open source operating systems.
That's it. It would be shit-ass suicide for them to sell of their linux systems.
The last of the loyal following is starting to drift off of Netware. Linux is the 2nd most popular operating system in the world and Linux and Windows is were Novel's customers are migrating to.
Without Linux, without Suse, there IS NO FUTURE FOR NOVEL. That's it. It's over. NDS is a great product, people are happy enough with Groupware and such, but without Linux Novell is just going to be another dying software company with a legacy operating system to support until all the hardware it's currently installed on wears the fuck out in 2-5 years. See also: SCO 5.0.x systems.
The investors love Linux, the community loves Linux.
Novel is in the business in providing desktop solutions and desktop support solutions. Network directory systems, application servers, groupware, etc etc.
So is Microsoft. Microsoft is in the business of providing desktop solutions and desktop support solutions.
The main difference is is that Novell's products are slightly nicer, but Microsoft OWNS AND DESIGNS the only fucking viable enterprise desktop operating system. It's kinda of a steep hill to climb there.
Novell's only hope, and pretty much any software company that isn't Microsoft, is that Linux desktop in the business place succeeds.
Why do you think that Oracle sell's more databases to run on Linux then anything else? Why are they making all this free software and built a open source distributed network file system for the linux kernel? Why do you think that Peoplesoft and various other companies are hurridly porting all their software to Linux systems?
It's because Microsoft is in the business now of making server systems, making desktop systems, and sells MS SQL for those systems and is working on Great Plains and related software to compete directly with Peoplesoft. (great plains may suck now, but not after Microsoft gets Vista out the door, throws several hundred million dollars at it, and integrates it seemlessly with Office and Windows)
Hell all the anti-virus and anti-spyware companies companies have had Linux products hidden away for a long time, and probably would be able to sell them if there actually was viruses and spyware actually existed for Linux. They shit a brick when Microsoft bought a anti-virus company and is now integrating it into their desktop system.
When your biggest competitor owns and designs the only platform that you sell software for, your going to fucking loose. Netscape learned this. Novell learned this. And dozens of other companies have learned this. The hard way. It makes investors very nervous.
You can make money on developing Windows software for a long time. As long as what your doing isn't that profitable Microsoft will leave you alone... but if you make a enough money to get noticed you can expect that as soon as Microsoft's investors start pissing and moaning the first thing they'll do is (if your lucky) buy your company out and re-release the software under a different name, or buy one of your competitors, or build their own product, and put your business out of business in a short time.
The future, probably the only viable future were Microsoft doesn't dominate most of the profitable parts of enterprise software, is the one were Linux and related open source software on the desktop in a big way in the next 2-3 years.
Novell's investors know this and generally sorta understand it. Throwing away Suse for any amount of money would kill Novell quicker then anything else they could possibly do to themselves and the investors will only see a tiny fraction of the money that they invested in them.