What will it take to turn Novell around??? Frankly, they're going to have to pull an Apple: _radical_ restructuring and refocusing. NetWare dependencies need to be deengineered. Stop paying homage to Noorda and just cut the damned thing loose. If NetWare is really so marketable, spin it off.
I would also officially move the headquarters to San Jose. Sure keep the Utah space, but force all the execs to move to SJ. Or better, axe most of them and rehire. The Utah "if I don't see it it must not exist" attitude is so powerfully destructive to Novell.
I would abandon the move to provide more professional services and concentrate on new higher-margin software-based products.
One of Novell's great downfalls has been a virtually non-existent developer community. That needs to be addressed... in a big way.
The sales force is operating in a franchise model-- highly decentralized with an almost competitive parochial mentality. This is absolutely wrong wrong wrong. Axe Nortz (who is a perfectly nice guy, don't get me wrong) and find somebody from Ariba or Oracle.
Stop reshuffling the bad seeds. Funnily enough, the crappy managers get reassigned, while the talented ones with opt out or get bought out. That's all backwards.
Ok, so that's my scathing condemnation, at least extemporaneously.
Could Novell get more milage from making NDS open source?? That question is so esoteric as to not really be relevant, IMHO. Novell hasn't given NDS away for free to anyone. eDirectory, sort of, it has traded for ad impressions, and it has sold heavily discounted, but never given away that I'm aware of.
Would it better to give it away for free? I can't imagine how. That's just the Netscape/IE model. Doesn't apply to enterprise software, IMHO. Further, there would be no guarantee that NDS would be accepted as a standard, putatively-- which means "assumed to be true without conclusive evidence" by my understanding-- or not. Putatively, you could make the argument that it is already the standard. |
