Novell CEO Gives Behind the Scenes Account of Microsoft Deal

raffe writes "Here is a Q&A with Ron Hovsepian CEO of Novell. He describes 'a love-hate thing' between the two companies." From the article: "This past May, I picked up the phone and called Kevin Turner, the COO at Microsoft. I knew Kevin when he was the CIO at Wal-Mart. I said, "Kevin, I'd like to have a conversation about what the customer needs. If you could put back on your old hat as a customer, if I came in and started talking to you about virtualization on Linux, and this Microsoft guy showed up and started talking to you about virtualization on Windows, what would you say to us?""

Comments

Who will do that?

[khasim]

Running Microsoft on Linux is only a fraction as bad as running Linux and no Microsoft.

And what company is going to deploy Linux just so it can virtualize Windows? Why wouldn't they save the time and expertise (and finger pointing) and just deploy Windows as the host and Windows as the guest?

So were a company would have gone the direction away from Microsoft all together, it still lets Microsoft in the door to cause them to think otherwise. or at least for parts of their operations.

But it was Novell's CEO who said that he lost deals to Microsoft, again and again and again. I don't often see Microsoft complaining about losing deals to Linux.

It isn't that Microsoft is winning the deals, they got lucky on a few. Microsoft knows this.

You might want to check your email server logs. It seems that 95%+ of the businesses we deal with are running Exchange.

And Novell's marketshare has been in decline for years.

Somehow that doesn't add up to "got lucky on a few".

Re:Who will do that?

[bberens]

Yes, but not the integration piece (exchange) which was basically his point.

www.vmware.com

[khasim]

People who want a stable subtrate operating system on which they can deploy their Windows services? Think about it. A stable underlying OS allows you to stop worrying about the actual servers and focus on the VMs. This means you can do things like hot VM fail-over, for higher availability. Seems like a big win to me.

WMWare already offers something like that.

And Linux, when administered by someone who does NOT know what he's doing is no more stable than Windows. But Windows can be as stable as Linux when you have a competent administrator. In your scenario, the company would be paying for Linux experts AND Windows experts. Why? Why not just spend the money and get competent Windows administraters?

Not to mention developers who might want a Linux box as their core OS while they do Windows development. Or those doing cross-platform work.

www.vmware.com

It's even free (as in beer) now. And you don't have to tweak the guest OS. It runs clean. We use it all the time.

Re:www.vmware.com

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realise that VMWare's bigger stuff like ESX runs a stripped down version of Red Hat, right? So basically you're getting the same thing that the OP said. Linux with Windows on top, hot swapping VM's, fail-over support, etc..

AFAIK, only the Player and Server are free-as-in-beer. The Player can't actually create the VM, or install a guest OS, etc...and I'm assuming that the free Server is crippled as well.

The Workstation is not free, but it is a reasonable price (~$200 US) for a single developer looking to do Windows development on a FOSS box.

Re:www.vmware.com

[brouski]

To my knowledge the free Server product isn't crippled. It may be missing some odd administrative bells and whistles, but nothing I've missed at all.

IP and indemnity issues

[HRbnjR]

All I cared about was, I lost a deal with a large retailer to Microsoft for the first time about 12 or 18 months ago. It was going to be an all-Linux deal, and I lost it because they were unduly influenced, in my opinion, to be fearful of these [IP and indemnity issues]. From my point of view that was really too bad, because Linux lost. Then I watched it happen three more times.

I don't believe for a second that Microsoft wasn't acutely aware of exactly that! They understand very well that they win deals due to FUD about Linux IP and indemnity issues, and that is exactly why they entered into this agreement.

This deal is serving as a major catalyst to make that very problem worse, not better!

Re:Wow...

[Nicholas Evans]

As I recall, he actually said the same thing during the press conference (I sucked it up and listened to the audio since Quicktime decided it didn't know how to decode the video).

From the transcript:

What I really said was, look it, as a customer, you would have taken me, when I was working at my old company and said, I want you to get this, and get together with the other vendor, and make this stuff work. Don't put that responsibility on me. And Kevin, being a former CIO at Wal-Mart, he resonated, that was right on the money. He went and grabbed Steve and Brad, and said, you know what, this probably is the right thing. Steve had been hearing it, and Brad had been hearing it from customers, and then that really drove them into a meeting that we had in the May timeframe where we got the teams together and really began those discussions. I would tell you, it always takes two in a relationship. Both sides were listening very intently to each other, but that's how the story unfolded. Thank you to Kevin.

The only real piece of material in this interview tht was original was Mr. Hovsepian every-so-delicately pussyfooting around saying anything useful about Microsoft's IP allegations. I mean, come on. Grow some balls. Steve Ballmer just beat you over the head with the proverbian chair while you were standing on stage with him and you refuse to so much as condemn the comment?

Re:Debian is the second largest GNU/Linux distro

[Pantero Blanco]

Well, if you are not happy with Novell, you can always migrate to Debian, the second largest GNU/Linux distribution.

From the Netcraft's GNU/Linux distribution share stats:
RH - 34%,
Debian - 25%
Suse - 11 %

That chart is only for webservers. Debian has nowhere near that much of the Linux market overall, though distros derived from it might.

My definition of stability

[OmniGeek]

Is my Samba server that's been running in a back room for two years, and only ever gets rebooted when the power's out long enough to drain the UPS (which has happened maybe twice during that time.) Didn't even need a reboot when we changed its IP address. Did I mention it's had NO problems since being initially configured?

Parent poster has it dead on about uptime...

Re:One has to wonder

[Billly Gates]

Which just shows the mono and c# loyalists who ignored the patent and legal implicantions with it because it was better than java are idiots.

Mono has been around for 2 years and yet winforms is still not finished the last time I took a look at it last spring. Winforms has been around since .net 1.0. I have yet to see a single app that could cross compile to Linux and Windows nor have I ever seen any successfull non Windows sites use ASP.net using mono.

Now since java is GPLed its time to abandon Mono. Its been known for many years that it had legal implications associated with it and yet Miguel thought such accusations were crazy.

Re:Debian is the second largest GNU/Linux distro

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian has nowhere near that much of the Linux market overall, though distros derived from it might.

And you know this how?

You think people who use Debian for web servers would go out and get a different disro just to run mail servers, ftp servers, DNS, firewall, etc.? I'm sorry I think it's just dumb to assume that, of course they are using Debian to run the above services as well. Why increase the maintenance overhead when there is no need to do that?

So, in summary, yes, I think the stats correctly state that Debian *IS* the second largest GNU/Linux distro even though it covers only web servers.