All,
Here is an excerpt from a e-mail I received from a Novell account
manager:
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Hello,
You may have read PC Week's August 25th article by John Dodge, entitled, "Novell: The News Is All Bad--Or Is It?". John Dodge ended the article with this quip:
"Rooting for the underdog is just wishful thinking. Novell is dead, and the only difference between Gil [Amelio] and Eric is that the latter temporarily has a job. If there are customers with long-term plans to stick with Novell, I would love to hear from them. Write me at john_dodge@zd.com. "
He asked for customer response. . . and he got it! His mail is so flooded he at first thought it was coordinated by Novell! Talk about being out of touch! Gil Amelio and Eric Schmidt the same? Does he get out much?
One of our favorites: "If ignorance is bliss, you must be a very happy camper."
Here are a few more examples. These are real people; not the tabloids. Their responses speak volumes and point out that the editors of our trade rags have lost complete touch:
"...It reflects poorly on an industry which is supposed to be founded on logical and coherent thought that can allow itself to be manipulated, in mind set and the press, so much by Microsoft and Bill Gates and all the money. Everyone is in awe of the money, but the products, frankly, suck."
"History will one day look back on this boondoggle at the beginning of the information age and wonder how intelligent people allowed it to happen."
"Personally, I view this mostly as marketing (Microsoft) vs. technology (Novell/Sun). There are those who are easily impressed by the glitter and glitz of the Microsoft marketing machine. They are the ones that don't want to expend the time and energy to find out what is really the best networking solution. I can see you're a person easily impressed by the wrapper."
And still another wrote: "Don't be so quick to bury Novell. Those of us in this industry who understand the technology know that you should judge a company's value to your organization by the product it provides you and not by the TV commercials, screen savers, and other garbage they use to hype an under-achieving, non-scalable, non-global, no-directory-service hardware and administration nightmare called Windows NT."
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If anyone would like to see a more extensive collection of
customer responses, I've made them available on my web site:
netreslt.com
This is a Word document. Depending on how you have your browser configured, you may have to save the file to your hard disk Personally, I have my browser set to lauch WordPad for all DOC files, which I then save to hard disk if I want to keep it. This has the benefits of launching faster then Word, and also eliminates any macro viruses that may be infecting the file.
This is a good (but admittedly small and unscientific) indicator of the loyalty of the customer base.
Jerry |
