Backseat CEO. Novell. Let Me Drive Your Car.
With a
week's worth of pent-up advance-notice and anxiousness behind it (that's like a million years in speculative blog-land!),
Novell announced its upcoming 600ish layoffs last week. That's less than
the rumored 20%, and a little more than the rumored 10%. Once the news hit, there were some
slightly misleading freak-outs going on ("Novell to cut desktop line!?!"). Not misinformation exactly, just people being theatrical, backed up by lots of people who link to stories without reading them, and then
people populating comment-boards based on 3rd-level filters of the not-all-the-way read reports. The usual. Probably even Novell doesn't exactly know how it's going finally prioritize projects and staffing, but is has made some official announcements. It will
make GNOME the default desktop. Not exactly a radical redirection.
Novell's obviously a big company, with enough history, legacy customers, and money to not be in danger of disappearing overnight. However, I wonder if they understand who their audience and most immediate prospective customers are. While there's no single customer profile, there's no doubt that most Linux growth has been in displacing other UNIX flavors, not Windows.
It's a much smaller leap. And while cheaper licenses, totally available source code, community-centric support, and faster-paced releases can be an adjustment for anybody, UNIX shops don't need to be sold or introduced with quite the same language. Novell's marketing often seems like it's directed towards itself. Yes, it
is a whole new world, Novell! A new world for
you. UNIX users are beyond the proof of concept stage of the marketing of Linux. Data centers looking to displace 500 Solaris Sparc boxes with Linux, have already been running Apache (open source), and Sendmail (open source) for years! They don't need an army of marketing people convincing them Linux is safe. They are familiar with many of the attributes of Linux through exposure to related technologies that exist on most flavors of UNIX. When transitioning to Linux, people want to move forward with people who know and care about the technology.
Novell's attempts to make its support and tools "friendly" don't always fit in well with pre-existing UNIX environments. Novell's emphasis on GUI tools and "ease of use" don't actually help you transition to Linux if you already have 34 home-cooked UNIX scripts that just need to be re-written for Linux. Redhat seems to understand this. Google found
147,000 mentions of the word "Solaris" in the redhat.com domain, (including a
Solaris-to-Linux migration center) only
24,200 in the novell.com domain.
Novell's offerings, particularly NLD, sometimes seem like they're being marketed towards current Microsoft users. And maybe Novell'd have an edge there over other distros, given their Microsoft-literate background. If that's Novell's plan, great. Maybe that's the right approach. However, that's a much longer campaign, to convince an organization embedded with Microsoft, to transition to Linux, than one embedded with UNIX. They seem to bounce back and forth between who they compare themselves with, and what problems they're trying to solve. It's fine to solve multiple problems, and have multiple customer profiles. Just don't be careful not to alienate the ones who are likely to choose your closest competitor (Redhat these days), by speaking to them like they're using the products from your old one (Microsoft).
