Posted on 03/23/2006 5:46:01 PM PST by Utah Girl
For Novell's chief marketing strategist, the news Wednesday couldn't have been better: Microsoft had once more postponed release of Windows Vista.
"Why, I feel bad for them," he quipped, holding up a copy of USA Today with a headline trumpeting, "Microsoft Delays New Windows" as the Salt Palace convention crowd of several thousand cheered.
Dragoon noted that the current test version of Vista had reportedly been found by reviewers to be short on "finesse, polish and general impressiveness" in its bid to replace Windows XP, which debuted in late 2001.
"I don't know if you guys knew that [Vista] was originally expected to be ready by end of 2004," Dragoon added. "The last time I checked, it is 2006."
Microsoft says its consumer version of Vista will be released in January. Corporate buyers who purchase volume licenses should be able to get the upgrade in November.
Novell's SUSE Linux 10, along with its family of desktop, communications, mobile and networking applications, is ready now, Dragoon said.
"And I can guarantee that what you see today [in the conference demonstration] will be impressive, will have polish and will give you hope and confidence that there actually is a legitimate choice," Dragoon said.
Even with its latest troubles rolling out the next generation of Windows, Microsoft continues to dominate the computer OS market with an 85 percent to 90 percent share. Novell's Linux suite, while critically acclaimed, still lags behind RedHat Inc.'s versions of the "open source," or freely distributed, OS.
Matt Friedemann, vice president of engineering, and Guy Linardi, senior products manager, said Novell programmers and open-source community contributors had labored more than a year to produce a family of new Linux products for the PC desktop.
Testing of the new software also involved study groups made up of ordinary users who were asked to perform typical tasks, such as browsing the Internet, sending e-mail, creating a document or using a Web cam.
Engineers monitored the groups, regularly reviewing, tweaking and re-testing products before they were deemed ready for release.
"Geeks are nice, but there are a lot of other 'non-geek' people in the world, and we wanted to reach them," Friedemann said.
I hope for your sake you know this is false?
its easier to set up and run Linux than Windows these days
My it's getting deep in here.
Its not for geeks anymore and you can choose between Windows-like KDE and Mac-like GNOME for a GUI shell.
Because people other than geeks care about having 2 separate and largely incompatible desktop shells?
Unfortunately, that is happening more and more. I was laid off about three years ago, and I was kind of surprised at the number of people who came up to me and said that they were going to Microsoft, and were dumping Netware/Groupwise, etc. Novell has some excellent products, but can't seem to market them. Of course, the juggernaut that is Microsoft has had a lot to do with that.
I wouldn't... At least not Microsoft. As you know, I'm a former Novell specialist, and I've been working for a Windows shop for the last 3 months. 168 servers, 2 domains, 2 forests...
Compared with eDirectory, AD really SUCKS! Nowhere near as flexible. And the so called tools that MS gives you don't do a very good job of letting you see what's going on under the hood of AD. And there's no "real-time" monitoring of AD replication. Sure, there's replmon, but it's now been my experience that it doesn't tell you that something's going wrong until it's REALLY wrong. And trying to deal with the syntax of repladm is a nightmare. Netdiag and dsdiag are useful, but again, nothing really in "real time." What I wouldn't do for a tool like Novell's iMonitor or DSTRACE. And management is so much simpler, expecially for file and print services.
I'd take Zenworks over SMS in a heartbeat. And I like GroupWise SO much better than Exchange, from an administrative point of view.
No, I wouldn't buy Novell stock. The company's a disaster when it comes to marketing terrific software. But their products and technology are top rate.
Mark
I tried it, and if you are a non-tech windows consumer, you will not switch.
Yep. I just imagine my mom trying to navigate through Linux. It's not going to happen.
I'm a geek, so I like that kind of stuff.
And that's the sad part.
That's the truth. They sat on their laurels for so many years, milking Netware for all it was worth. And any new product/company they bought, they didn't market or seem to pay much attention to it (re: WordPerfect, Cambridge whatever it was, etc.) Novell is eternally changing their sales force, don't know why they can't hire a great marketing team. The odd thing is that the bad marketing has continued for so many years with different sets of management.
And on top of that, when Novell released NW4 and NDS (now eDirectory), their competitor was Windows NT and IBM OS/2 Lan Manager. Lots of companies were very interested in NDS, a unified, hierarchical directory. The problem was that Novell was way too proud, price wise, of NDS. A major Novell client here in KC had over 300 Novell servers, in a mix of NW2 and NW3. In fact, for a while, I was building 2 or 3 NW3 Multiprotocol Routers (each with 3 Madge Token Ring adapters) for them a week! When it came time to upgrade, Novell gave them a price that drove them to Microsoft. They were able to migrate to Windows NT servers, buy all new servers, and send their entire internal support staff to training for less than Novell wanted for a software upgrade.
And today, the company I work for (it's a Windows shop with 1 last Novell server) needed to order another 20 NW6.0 licenses. Just for eDirectory as connection licenses... No applications. $147.00 each. Novell's still trying to price themselves out of business.
Mark
It does not matter what Linux can do in the background, the average windows user is going to stick with what is familiar. My own brother in law is afraid to load his new Norton disk without coaching! (he prefers to pay $29.95 even though I tell him he can get better virus protection for free).
No, it's about server applications. Can Exchange run on a Novell or UNIX server? GroupWise (the MTAs and Post Offices) will run on a mix of NetWare, Windows Servers, and or Linux. And you can have Zenworks running the management on your network without having a single NetWare server. Things like policy based imaging, application rollouts and distribution, policy management, etc...
Mark
While that is a legit complaint I think it's your only one. It's never been a problem for us, but we do have significant investment in horsepower and pipes.
I agree with you.
They're using it as a cash cow. Same for Groupwise.
168 servers? How many workstations?
That's exactly the situation that I was in... I was out of work for nearly 4 months. There just isn't much call for a Novell MCNE/CNI (former MCNI, until they retired the cert), outside of education in Kansas City. Lots of schools still use Novell, because Novell practically gives their entire software suite away. I seem to recall it's less than $10 a seat for NetWare, GroupWise, Zenworks, and Bordermanager. I'm now working for a company that started out as a Novell shop a few years ago, and they still have 1 NetWare 6.0 server. And they've got more than 160 Windows servers!
Mark
Nope, but somehow it still manages to be the number 1 email solution. Novell can try to maintain their compatibility over as many different platforms as they want, but that isn't helping their operating system business which is how most people view Novell. Bottom line is everyone wants to be the next Microsoft, but they refuse to follow the process that got MS there in the first place, which is to start with a great desktop, and is quite obviously now much easier said than done.
Frankly, I'm not really sure... It's not my department. I only deal with the networking and servers. The workstations and remote sites are handled by a different department. The amazing thing is that will all those servers and network devices, my department has a staff of 4! I think that there are about 150 people at the main (HQ) site, and then we've got nearly 600 remote locations. I'd guess that there are somewhere around 3000 users. We've got a production site, and a standby site, so we're really only using about 100 servers in production, with the other 68 at a remote "hot site" getting updates. Each site has 60 "process servers" which are Terminal Services servers, and 8 SQL servers. The rest of the servers are at the main site, running different applications. But for the majority of file and print services (at least for HQ), it's all done on a single NW6.0 server. But it's in the process of being phased out. There are still 3 critical apps that use it, one of them actually runs a SQL database on the server.
Mark
Well, that is pretty amazing. I look after 3 servers and support about 50 clients and it is hard to imagine 4 people looking after even 100+. I've seen rules of thumb of 1 admin per 10-15 servers. I assume you have end user help desk staff as well as server admins.
BTW, I do SQL programming as well but even monitoring servers, particularly mail servers, does take time to do it properly.
Read this lol
Eli Lilly needs to airlift more Prozac to the Microsoft campus toute suite.
Warez versions that don't suck or habitually crash will take much longer.
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