Some observations from Novell's Participation at a Computer Expo in Novi, Michigan
What I learned:
-Netware 5 will ship at the end of August
-All Novell guys seemed very enthusiastic
-In 1992 Novell shipped 120,000 servers, in 1997 they shipped 1 million!!!!(is this figure possible or I misheard?). If true, I have underestimated the incredible growth in this market going forward.
-250,000 people will test the final beta of Netware 5. That has "far surpassed" their expectations.
-An employee at the booth told me that the results coming out tomorrow will be better than the last quarter (EXTREME CAUTION: The same was told by a Novell accounting guy in Utah last year to Vinod before a carpet bomb was unleashed. This was an engineer from Detroit....) But interesting observation by him nevertheless. He also told me that Netware 5 will cause the stock price to quadruple at least. I got the sense that he believed in what he was telling me. That's good to see...
Some secondary observations:
-Very nice size booth, about 5 Novell employees staffing it, very friendly and nice.
-The booth was right in the center of the bldg so many people had to walk by it because they just couldn't miss it.
-Rough estimate of crowd present in the expo:500
-Novell's booth was always frequented by at least one visitor, usually two, sometimes three. Not bad but not great either. HINT: Get some free drawing and some free stuff next time, geez!
-Novell's presentation was an hour long, an overview of Novell. Great presentation and a bit heavier on the technical side (crowd did not seem to mind, they actually loved that acronym talk).
-We started with 30 people, probably we had 40 at the end. They seemed to like what they saw, quite a few of them stayed to speak one on one with the speaker afterwards.
-Opening slide "The Network is Novell" in huge red letters. I liked that, it sure made the point across.
-What I found encouraging and different this time (from the other presentation six months ago) was that the speaker was more agressive pushing products. He asked questions and he was telling them "talk to me after the presentation" or "this product would solve this problem", etc. He offered his help to the guy with the six NT domains several times<g>. He mentioned the blue screen of death a few times too.
-The rest was just talking about the products and their stategies. NOthing really new to add here.
-Oh, one point. Netware 5 will not include NDS for NT, it will be offered as an add-on product. NDS was emphasized during the whole presentation as the "heart" of Novell's stategy. Not including it in Netware 5 just does not make sense to me.
Waiting for the numbers tomorrow....I am holding regardless.
Victor, all you got do is click next. Paul please Keep posting. Any insight on Indonesia? I was surprised to hear the Sec of State pretty much calling for Suharto to resign today, because that tells me that a successor has at least been identified. But Who?? Not the muslim leader or the current VP (army won't accept him). It's getting really confusing there every day....
George |
