Joe,
No, this is constructive criticism and is good. I don't have time to address all of the points in detail now, but I will offer a few thoughts on some of the areas. NOTE: These are my thoughts. They do not necessarily represent my companies in any way shape or form. They are wholly my own....
<2.Novell consistently failed in the technical execution of building a client/server application server out of
NetWare; and,>
This is exactly where our strategy of Java on the server comes in. The WWW community is moving to Java based applets and servlets. We are putting the infrastructure in place to run these combinations with our publicly announced (and in beta) JVM on the server.
<3.IS administrators and LAN administrators, the people who manage distributed computing for the
enterprise, indicate that supporting multiple operating environments drains ever-shrinking IS resources. The
choice of a more homogeneous operating environment allows them to minimize or dissipate problems
integrating, deploying, and supporting client/server applications; and >
Again, the movement behind Java. IS likes the concept of run the same exact thing anywhere. Otherwise, you can say that everybody will only run Windows, or only run UNIX, or only run OS/2. This is not likely. Trying to compete in the battle for the desktop application space would be the biggest money sink ever, and would surely hurt the stock price even more....
<1.IT planners believe that the latest, client/server applications and development tools are to be found on
Windows NT, OS/2, and Unix -- not NetWare; >
This is a dated statement. More and more are looking to the intranet/internet, and that means web. Supporting industry standards provides much access to play in this space. Novell is committed on several fronts to promoting and developing these industry standards. Then anyone's network application should work with any of the above platforms, including NetWare. This is somewhat true today, but will become more valid over time as the Web and Java, and the base underlying protocols are pushed to standards by the fact that the customer does NOT want applications which only work with only one companies offerings.
<Enable Novell users to gain access to Internet-directory services and applications by exploiting the emerging
Internet directory services (LDAP, Light weight Directory Access Protocol) standard rather than by trying
to force NDS upon the Web community; and, Succeed in new business ventures (particularly in its Internet,
multimedia and telephony-related endeavors) in order to open new sources of income to replace revenue
lost by decreasing NetWare marketshare. >
We have helped to DEFINE that standard and of course we provide support for it through compatibility libraries and an LDAP gateway server.....
<Make additional applications available by integrating NDS with Windows NT server;>
Hmmm... This sounds a lot like NT workstation manager....
< The whole chevron story>
Well, that is disappointing and I was aware of the story. I don't have enough detailed information to comment on this meaningfully except to say it sounds like a decision has been made to go %100 Microsoft, partially because of huge package discount deals that cross between both the applications (i.e. word processors) and the servers.
I will not go on from here, although there are things going on in many of the areas brought out in the articles.
See, we are listening and are trying our best to provide solutions to many of these problems. We are not living in the dark, and do look around to see what problems need to be attacked. That's where feedback like this helps us to understand the things that need to be done. Maybe we need to do a better job at countering articles like this, since in fact, we are doing half of what they say we aren't. From my recent experience, the company is getting better in that area.
Hope this adds some faith to you that we are listening and are addressing many of these areas of concern...
Jim Olsen |
