Novell Picks Sun Executive for Top Post (Washionton Post and LA Times)
Wednesday, March 19, 1997
Novell Picks Sun Executive for Top Post
Technology: The move is seen as an effort to protect
Novell's market share.
By RAJIV CHANDRASEKARAN, Washington Post
Seeking to guard its threatened dominance of the market
for software that runs office computer networks, Novell Inc. (
) on Tuesday named Sun Microsystems Inc. (
)'s top technologist to be its chairman and chief
executive.
Eric Schmidt, a key architect of the Internet's Java
programming language and one of the most respected technical
minds in Silicon Valley, will assume the new job April 7.
He joins a company that three years ago was widely seen
as the only one big and broad enough to take on industry
leader Microsoft Corp. () But since then it
has stumbled, analysts said, losing market share in its core
network software business and failing to adapt its products
rapidly for the fast-growing Internet.
Schmidt replaces Robert J. Frankenburg, who quit as
Novell's chief executive in August after criticism that he wasn't
reshaping the company quickly enough.
Schmidt said he decided to leave Mountain View-based
Sun, one of the largest and most healthy companies in Silicon
Valley, because of the potential he sees in Novell.
"I've done my due diligence and concluded there's
tremendous technology inside the company and we need to get
it out as fast as we can," Schmidt said in an interview.
Schmidt did not offer a detailed plan for reviving the
business. But he said he intends to focus heavily on
Internet-related technologies, including tools to help Novell
users better find information on the global network.
Some industry watchers questioned whether Schmidt, who
has never run a company, has the expertise to pilot Novell,
which has 5,800 employees and $1.4 billion in sales last year.
Novell's stock rose 87.5 cents to close at $9.44 on the
Nasdaq Stock Market.
Long the leading supplier of software that enables
computers in offices to talk to each other, Novell's flagship
NetWare product has been losing ground to Microsoft's
Windows NT operating system and other products.
Based in Orem, Utah, Novell has about 50% of the market
for software that connects desktop computers to printers and
data-storage devices. But in the fast-growing market for
software to run intranets--corporate networks modeled after
the Internet--the company has failed to act aggressively,
analysts said.
The company also has made other missteps. In 1994,
Novell spent $855 million to buy WordPerfect Corp., the
maker of word-processing software by that name. But after the
software failed to erode the share of Microsoft's competing
products, Novell sold the division for just $124 million.
Copyright Los Angeles Times
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