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: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...