Hello David,
> You said, "Major customers have no interest in any platform but a
> standard Intel motherboard"
Yes. I did say this. I guess that I was arguing shear volume.
> Oh, pleeeaaaaaaaase! Ever hear of the IBM SP/2, the HP 9000, SUN
> workstations, SGI workstations, the AS/400, a mainframe?!!
Oh yes, I have heard of these. But I would be willing to bet that on average, the fortune 1000 have hundreds, if not thousands, of times the number of Intel platforms as any of those listed above.
If I attempt to use some basic business decision logic (oh no ... now I'm stepping into dangerous territory!) I would like to get some idea of the potential that we are missing. Please try and help me here by contributing real numbers from your experience.
None of these figures are based on any known facts or have any relation to Novell. I'm simply trying to get an idea of ROI and it's effect on stock price.
1. If a company put forth the effort to port, test, document, and market for a "new" platform there is the associated cost of doing so. If we figure that this would take 600 "mysterious" man-months to accomplish, that would be an investment of over six months with 100 people. The cost of this could be $10M-$12M if we figure $20,000 per man-month. (Again, from my software experience I am extremely doubtful that all of this work could be done by 10 departments of 10 people in six months. And I'm guessing that we would be looking at the $20k per man-month which is also very low.)
2. If this company commits these 100 people to this task, they are doing nothing else. No other work is performed on existing technologies, updates, support, etc. for existing products. No enhancements are done either. (Now that's what we have other engineers for ... don't get worked up yet.)
3. If the product were released, and the sales started to occur, in general there would be a three to six month lag for sales to ramp and then the "possible" volume upgrades might occur. So we're looking at a year total?
4. How many copies would have to be sold to cause a major impact on the sales of the company to positively effect the stock price? Would the company have to sell 100,000 copies? 1,000,000 copies? (Salah ... any help here?)
So in the time, effort, and money spent ... would it be a worthwhile venture? Would the shareholders benefit? Do you really believe that huge numbers of people would buy this? Could you sell 100,000 copies of something other than UNIX on these machines? 1,000,000?
If I compare to the NT scenario I didn't see this happen. The hardware is too expensive, it's a "non-standard" platform. It's another platform to have parts for, support, and hope it will be around. Alpha (which I really like) just isn't doing the shear volume.
> This is the NOVL attitute I am talking about. As far as NOVL is
> concerned, the Intel chip is the only microprocessor on the planet.
Please. I want to make one thing very clear ... what you are responding to is *my* attitude, *my* perspective, and *my* post. There is no reason to assume that everybody at Novell thinks like I do. I am but one voice in the crowd. In fact there are many other people who do not seem to agree with me at Novell.
> And NOVL is trying to be an "ENTERPRISE-WIDE" solution?
Please refer to your list above and explain to me which platforms you mentioned are deployed to every desktop "ENTERPRISE-WIDE". Yes I know that companies have these other systems in small quantities, but what are the mainframes accessed by? I'm not seeing a lot of 3270s around. AS/400s, what are people using to access these systems? Yeah, there are some Sun and SGI workstations, but I guess I try to look at volume markets. But everywhere I look I see an Intel box ... running a Microsoft desktop operating system.
I know where you are coming from (I think ... I'm sure you will argue the point) and I agree with you in feeling, but reality is reality. I honestly respect the elegance and artisan aspects of computer technology ... but VHS sells.
Are you suggesting that Novell, at this point, heads off the VHS path?
> (You are also way off on the real reason why NT is no longer
> available on PowerPC, and the reason why NT is even on Alpha to
> begin with. Do your homework, I have posted this several times
> before).
I would greatly appreciate any information that you could provide me to point to the relevant posts! I would love to read the reasoning behind this. I was acutally a very strong supporter of PIN (Processor Independent NetWare) and of NT on RISC. I played with many of the early MIPS and PowerPC implementations. Many of my friends worked for companies involved in this effort. I've heard their perspective ... I'd love to learn more about yours.
I guess that overall I have to revert to basic business principals ... in this position I can't see expending energy to sell into small vertical markets with the products we have. I obviously don't understand or see the ROI. Please don't get upset, I'm sure that many people here would like to learn besides myself.
Scott C. Lemon |
