Novell Returns to the SUSE Name

soren42 writes "It appears that Novell has decided to rename their enterprise desktop line SUSE, once again. According to an announcement at CeBIT, Novell will be releasing the next version of their desktop product under the name SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop - ditching the moniker Novell Linux Desktop. Naming aside, it looks like the features will be there to make it a strong desktop competitor."

Comments

Good idea

[parasonic]

From my experiences, I've noticed that it's never a good idea to change the name of a well-known product unless you have a GOOD grip on the market where people are forced to remember/figure out the new naming. Otherwise, a lot of times, mass confusion occurs when something's name is changed, and customers go and try to find another product because they haven't been told that the name changed and assume that it disappeared (or think that something else might change).

Props to Novell. This was the right move.

Re:Good idea

[moranar]

Normally, what's lacking from the "free" editions are three things:
1) Official support, which you don't get either in debian.
2) Expensive proprietary software, which you don't get either in Debian.

It might be different for Fedora, but I don't think there's any other distinction in SuSE or Mandriva.

> Why pay for a pro edition when I can apt-get anything I want (or compile if you're a Gentoo-user)?
> Just because the distro is harder to use?

To support a distro, most of the times. To get official, quick support. Oh, and please get in the 21st century: we do have other usable package managers other than apt-get. Please inform yourself, and spread it. I'm sick of Debian fans comparing apt-get to the bare rpm when Yast, smart, urpmi and yum exist.

Good brand recognition is important

[LardBrattish]

Just ask Borland/Inprise/Borland...

Honestly

[WebHostingGuy]

I didn't even know they dropped the SUSE name. I guess maybe they didn't market the other name very well. (They might want to try to brand SUSE a little better).

Re:Name matters

[mtenhagen]

In my mind an image popups of of powerfull, reliable and secure software. Not the best looking but something you can build your business on.

With SUSE I think about some guys who decide to package a bunch of free software.

I think most of the "older" IT decision makers still remember the old novell software as being pretty stable.

Re:Some screenshots

[ylikone]

I love how distro's always have screenshots... when in fact they look the same as anything else running KDE or Gnome. It's ridiculous.

Novel sux, SUSE sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been a RedHat who...um, practioner...since 4.2 and through Fedora Core 4.

I just installed OpenSUSE 10.0 and am really enjoying it. I had to live with NLD 9 ona job last year, and it was OK. I preferred CentOS however.

But, SUSE 10 is solid, quick (once you turn off Beagle indexing in GNOME) and full featured.

Novell fails to inspire confidence. But, if they use the SUSE name, I can almost forget it is from Novell. I like that.

Brand recognision

[themushroom]

To be kinder than a previous post (but the "old and busted" sentiment remains, hee hee!), brand name recognision is there:

SuSE is the name of a Linux distro. People know it's a Linux distro. Calling it "Novelle" makes it sound like it's not a Linux distro.

Novelle is a networking systeme. Networking, not a desktop environment. SuSE may be able to be used in a networking environment but it's not a network environment in itself like Novelle.

Corporate vanity failed. The world is on the way to being right again. It'll be better when Earthlink spins off its dialup service, renames it back to Mindspring, and hires Americans to take the tech calls since the reason why the two merged was for Earthlink [good brand, lousy cust service] to obtain the customer service skillz of Mindspring [unknown brand, JD Powers-praised cust service].

To be expected.

[jd]

Brand Recognition Good, Brand Confusion Bad.

The big danger is that chopping and changing the brand name again will worsen the confusion, rather than clarify things. Those who have grown used to the Novell name may not be so happy with the SuSE name and may even reach the (incorrect) conclusion that it's a distribution fork. Remember, the enterprise market has been pumped up with the FUD that Linux is going to fork "some day".

The name-change to Novell was a Bad Idea (apologies to 1066 And All That), so it would seem that switching back to SuSE would be a Good Idea. There is also strong evidence that the Solaris/SunOS name-switching by Sun didn't kill the product line - although it definitely didn't help and was such a farce that it is still clearly remembered to this day.

Red Hat's method (Red Hat for the Enterprise, Fedora Core for the Real Users) is acceptable, though certainly not brilliant. It's one way of leveraging brand recognition for multiple brands. Works better in the car industry than the software industry, I suspect.

Re:To be expected.

[LardBrattish]

Red Hat's method (Red Hat for the Enterprise, Fedora Core for the Real Users) is acceptable, though certainly not brilliant.

That's a marketing disaster for Red Hat IMHO.

They had the undisputed #1 dominant brand & split off the goodwill generating bit and forced most of their loyal users to switch to a different distro and - get this - the users figured there were OTHER non Red Hat Linux distros and - shock horror - some of them did stuff better than Red Hat.

Brilliant move morons. 5 years ago Red Hat was the shoo in no brainer distro for servers everywhere. Today Suse is the preferred supplier to the NSW govt.

Re:Just kill it already

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not, it killed Wordperfect.

Ha!

[recharged95]

A light went off in the company. Someone must have said, "Why do we have OpenSuSE and NLD and OES, SLES instead of just SuSE Linux?

At least MS (Windows ) and Apple (OSX ) got it right. And I mean the cute code name stuff in all Linux distros is starting to get out of hand.

Aside from RedHat, you guys got to admit SuSE has a lot of potential (i.e. OpenSuSE and SuperSuSE specifically).

Re:Name matters

[Bender Unit 22]

Yes but it never did help Novell to appeal to the tech guys, now did it?
They should have learned something from Microsoft 10 years, never mind the tech people having to work with it, but clever marketing directed at the suits (to which Novell sounds old).
(And when you got them, THEN you can make a reliable product, but that is another story :D)