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: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: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.