Linux Format has an interview with Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, the director of Linux and OSS marketing at Novell. “It’s been challenging for us to work with partners in a way that’s rational, but we’ve decided that in the next generation of our enterprise products, GNOME will be the default desktop. But we will continue to ship and support KDE.”
Or do we have to subscribe to that site to read the rest of it?
With Linux Format the full interview is in the magazine which you’ll need to buy.
And since Novell is a fairly irrelevant company these days I don’t see that there’s much in the way of news in this interview. Their desktop migration certainly isn’t going as well as he’s painting there.
And since Novell is a fairly irrelevant company these days I don’t see that there’s much in the way of news in this interview. Their desktop migration certainly isn’t going as well as he’s painting there.
I seriously need to try to find a way to block you from Novell threads, as you keep trolling in them. However, what took you so long this time?
Something to discuss with the crew, I’d guess.
Edited 2006-05-12 15:28
I’m actually agreeing with Thom on this one….
While I applaud Novell and find their migration and Linux policy to be interesting topics, I think the relevant bit of information here is that Greg here is a “director of marketing”. It doesn’t much matter what you’re marketing and why, but marketing people lie and spin as a necessary part of their jobs. Also, they usually have very little interesting technical knowledge. If you ever have an interview with a marketing director, make the interview about their marketing strategy or you’ll just get the propaganda that they feed everybody else.
If you know anything about Novell or follow what the company does, their marketing is basically non existent. If your marketing is non existent, then your ability to spin things is equally non existent!
I would mod you up if I could, but somehow I haven’t have mod poins for a long time now.
I seriously need to try to find a way to block you from Novell threads, as you keep trolling in them.
One person’s ‘telling it like it is’ is another’s ‘troll’ I suppose. The reasons why Novell are pretty irrelevant (and I’m sure you know them, because you’re up to date, know these things and have your ear to the ground at all times :-)) are:
1. Presumably you have a lot of experience with Novell software, and know many companies who use it. Presumably, you will know the opinions of the few existing customers, those who have left and those who are in the process of leaving.
2. Increasing support prices and squeezing existing customers to make their shrinking revenue look better in a shrinking market where many customers are throwing their lifebelts and themselves over the side.
3. Total confusion over OES as to whether it’s one single product, or two separate products in SLES and Netware 6.5. Separate licensing issues as well, just to confuse everyone. Is Novell really moving to Linux? Who knows? Many existing and former customers would say ‘who cares?’
4. Oh and speaking of which, where is Groupwise 7.0 these days? People are talking about pie-in-the-sky stuff like desktops and these idiots can’t even get a service pack that’s reasonable to install out to their paying customers.
http://news.com.com/Novell+brands+its+own+open-source+religion/2100…
“But rather than take on Microsoft across the board, Novell is picking areas it thinks are ready for adoption by a significant number of users within corporations, Jaffe said.”
5. Unless it, and the surrounding infrastructure, gains enough critical mass in areas to rival and surpass Windows it will never get off the ground (and how many years has this been talked about anyway?). Novell has this strange attitude of attacking Microsoft, and yet they think that they’re somehow not going to have to compete with Microsoft because they’re trying to back themselves into a nice, cushy little niche market that doesn’t exist. Unless they face it head on their core business is going to slide still further, and this desktop thing will unfortunately be seen for the insignficant failure that it is.
The list goes on. A decent comment that adequately illustrates many issues, who’s mod points would drop like a brick on here, would be:
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2006-05-10-014-26-NW…
I assume you thought I was talking about silly issues, that you and others around here think are important, like what desktop they use and all that, at the moment, mostly pointless open source software that the customers in the real world who pay them money don’t know or care about. Unfortunately, those well known KDE, Gnome and other fractious inside elements in Novell are just symptomatic of a far, far, far wider problem. Their leadership and direction is non-existant. I suppose Novell can just prove me and their few customers wrong, can’t they? The truthful ‘trolling’ might stop then, mightn’t it?
I know you’re still slightly sore about the ‘microkernel fad’ debacle. Truth hurts, but ‘that’s the way it is’ I’m afraid.
Something to discuss with the crew, I’d guess.
Something useful to do then?
Edited 2006-05-12 21:25
This guy is flat out lieing when he say Novel doesn’t want to become the Microsoft of Linux. Let’s see, they don’t want billions in cash reserve, they don’t want emperor like powers with OEMs, they don’t want a copy of their software on damn near 95% of all computers sold, they don’t want to be the top software company in the world, …etc yeah, that’s a lot to avoid right there.
Sure Microsoft is hated, critisized and feared, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are on top of the mountain. People keep yelling out Google, but if the US government would alow it, Google could be bought by Microsoft at the drop of a dime. Novel can only dream of such power, and if given the oportunity to get it, they’d 99.9% likely pass as the Marketing directer puts it. Cut the crap Jabroni!
Edited 2006-05-12 17:30
Now almost half of the company is on single-boot Linux, and we feel good about what we’ve accomplished. We’ve learned a lot – our methodology for helping companies go to Linux is so much richer because of our own experience. You can’t ask your customers to do something you’re not willing to do!
I think this parts is crucial, they have now the experice and now the problems that may take the conversion Im sure that thanks to this expericence they will help them a lot in future deployments.
Go job Novell.