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Novell CEO Gives Behind the Scenes Account of Microsoft Deal

Posted by samzenpus on from the and-then-what-did-he-say dept.

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?""

1 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Who will do that? by khasim · · Score: 4, Informative
    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".