Thanks Eric! ... it is encouraging to see reports like this in print. But, this strategy is not 'new' it's pretty much what we heard from Eric Schmidt within a month of his start ... just has some additional detail flushed out now, and some product is starting to ship (both beta, and some product content) ... so, it is good news that the press does seem to finally be coming around to at least understand Novell's technology capability.
IMHO ... from a technology perspective this is much better than most of the competitive offerings ... from a marketing perspective, too many of the most important people (the ones that make buying decisions) still don't seem to believe that Novell should be seriously considered ... still seems pretty easy to fix, still seems like they (Novell mgmnt) don't see this marketing objective as important ... and most distressing to me, they don't seem to have a really good handle on what they are going to sell, to who, when, and how. If they have this figured out properly ... we could probably expect a tripling of top line revenues, but it's either not done properly yet or they are still keeping it a secret.
The John C. Dvorak column that mentioned Novell as being capable of driving the Gigabit Ethernet, while saying that NT cannot cope with the speed requirements was a nice 'little' plum ... but much more can and should be done along these lines ... doesn't seem to be anyone at Novell actively working on this kind of marketing though! Dvorak has a pretty good reputation in the business ... both for honesty and the ability to sort out the hype from important information. If I was running the marketing programs at Novell ... Dvorak & about a dozen others with similar backgrounds and reputations would be getting lots of 'good information' about both Novell's products, and MSFT's shortcomings ... including free 'evaluation' copies of all products. And ... every ISP in the world would have a free '45 day' copy of BorderManager by now ... wonder how many actually got them?
On a different topic ... it seems to me that the Novell folk are much more knowledgeable about Lucent's technologies than the current business model indicates that is required ... makes me wonder if they are exploring some kind of 'partnership' with Lucent ... have you got any insights into what might happen if Lucent were to buy Novell, or Novell would try to buy Lucent? I still think the best deal for all would be an Intel/Novell merger ... and did think it was at least a 50% possibility earlier this year, seems to have been moved to the 'back burner' now though. |
