Steve,
No, I don't work for Novell, although I make my living servicing their products (primarily: I also get involved with Microsoft, Netscape, Bay, Cisco, Oracle, HP, Compaq, Intel, CA, IBM, and a few others).
I can understand the frustration and bewilderment that comes with seeing what seemed to be a sure thing turn bad (at least for the moment).
I don't think the company is a disaster. There have been some serious mistakes made by past management: a couple bad acquisitions, some product directions taken that didn't pan out (did you ever hear of the plan to marry the Mac user interface to a multi-tasking Novell DOS to compete with Windows on the desktop?), marketing that stinks, being way too slow in converting the product line to standards-based protocols. These mistakes are recognized now by everyone, and are being fixed. The company, it's products, and it's customer base remain very strong.
You're right that better products is no guarantee of success. However, I don't think that from a historical perspective, the cards are stacked against Novell, and in Microsoft's favor. Historically, Microsoft has failed miserably every time it tries to move from controlling the desktop into the networking arena. NT server may be selling a million copies a year, but hardly any of this cuts into Novell's market. The majority of these are used as small business network servers (killing Artisoft, but not meaning much to Novell), application servers, (a market historically dominated by small-scale Unix and OS/2), and intranet web servers (a new market).
Microsoft still can't compete effectively in the enterprise networking market. NT 5.0, the product that supposedly will finally enable them to do that (after all the broken promises in the past), is over a year away from actually shipping to customers (Microsoft has been saying it's "about a year away" for more than a year and a half now), and, being an infamous ".0" version from Microsoft, will be avoided like the plague by people who have experience with past major version releases from Microsoft.
It will take them two or three subsequent minor version upgrades before they start to get it right, so you may be looking at 2000-2001 before they are a serious threat to Novell's installed base. Y2K failures are going to totally change the IT environment (and probably the entire business environment) by then, and no one can know what will happen.
As everyone knows, it used to be said that no one got fired for buying from IBM. I don't think anyone gets fired for buying from Novell; their products generally work as advertised, and there are few if any major surprises in deploying Novell's products in an enterprise environment.
People actually do get fired for buying Microsoft and betting their company's future on vaporware and broken promises; I know of a few cases like this personally, and there have been some well-publicized cases of major corporations that have had abrupt changes in infrastructure decisions away from Microsoft and to Novell, accompanied by some involuntary changes in IT management. It doesn't take too many of these before the word gets around about who's safe to deal with, and who's not.
I must say that I'm rather disappointed in this forum. I've been lurking for most of a year, and actively participating for a few months. I started out hoping it would be a good source of solid information, but it seems to be more of a whine-fest than anything else. Then there are the day-trading stock manipulator wanne-bes who will tell any story in the hopes of moving the price an eighth. I'm coming to the conclusion that there is very little useful that I can learn here, and in any case, nothing that happens here is going to make a bit of difference to the market (either for the stock, or for networking products), or to me.
Jerry |
