A recent AMI-Partners Inc. report which stated “user challenges and a dearth of applications continue to hinder the growth of Linux servers and on the desktop” prompted one Novell executive to counter that point-of-view. Read more here.
Linux misperceptions the greatest challenge: Novell
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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There is no shortage of ways to make Linux into an application server. Actually, there are almost too many to pick from (J2EE, PHP, mod_perl, and so forth).
The desktop is seriously getting there. Even Sun’s JDS is easy to use (very impressive for a traditional UNIX company). OSS is doing a really good job of squeezing Microsoft from the bottom. Apple is there to squeeze from the top. The next few years are going to be a lot of fun, IMO.
Their own emnployees, truly. Over the past year I have gotten completly frustrated with Novell. Everything from the company itself is screaming LINUX, LINUX, LINUX, and telling us it’s ready. Everytime I go to a Novell meeting or training I keep hearing, “it’s not ready, almost, just around the corner” and when I ask about the half hearted attempt to push the Novell Linux line, the answer? “I’ve got to live here” is the answer I have gotten a number of times. As a man who owns a company that sells nothing but Linux solutions, this is absolutly infuriating to me! On top of everything, this is being said at trainings and meeting for their Linux products. I like the Novell products and what the company is doing, but at the same time feel as though it is they who constantly place roadblocks in my way of selling Linux soliutions.
If you work for Novell and either have issues with what I am saying, question it, or want to talk about it I would love to do so.
Garret Acott
Ruffdogs
Novell Platinum Partner
Like it or not, if your OS/Office Suite is on 90% of the desktops in the BUSINESS WORLD, then you’re in good shape. For the next two or three decades, anyway. MS isn’t going anywhere. Don’t hold your breath.
tell that to wordperfect where are they now ?
Their own emnployees, truly. Over the past year I have gotten completly frustrated with Novell. Everything from the company itself is screaming LINUX, LINUX, LINUX, and telling us it’s ready. Everytime I go to a Novell meeting or training I keep hearing, “it’s not ready, almost, just around the corner” and when I ask about the half hearted attempt to push the Novell Linux line, the answer? “I’ve got to live here” is the answer I have gotten a number of times.
Then their Linux strategy is merely a reprieve. They’re as dead as they were sticking with Netware until the end of time. What you’re about has got to extend throughout the entire company, even before you start pushing technology like Gnome or KDE or any other crap people talk about. That concept is absolutely smashed into Microsoft employees. Novell can’t even get their core business right, which is servers, let alone sell a so-called enterprise desktop in NLD. Their also going to totally decimate what they have in SLES with a lot of half-hearted Netware porting.
Suse should have stayed on their own, as I’ve often thought. They could have then bought Novell out in a couple of years.
A typo at http://www.ruffdogs.com:
– use a Windows immulation program to run your application on Linux
It’s under Products > Desktop Linux > Compatible Applications
Thanks, much appreciated.
“tell that to wordperfect where are they now ?”
Wordperfect was in a age before the massive computer boom, they had been crushed by office 97. Also MS just out product them.
Now all companies have MS office and are in it way deeper then anyone was in word perfect, not talking just percentage of material, but raw pages.
MS has continued to make Office a great product, it’s by far the best product they make. Companies aren’t going to move away for it unless there is some extreme reasons.
Furthermore people are exchanging documents in electronic form way more then they were in the grand days of word perfect. If you are going to send and receive documents from others. You are going to use MS office. The only way a company can begin to think to switch to something else is when all other companies are using that something else already.
Its not about sending just something they can read or get the info (pdfs) and its not about “hacked compatibility” it’s about being the same.
Far as OS in general. Until all the same apps a person has been using are on linux, and until linux, and the apps offer something many fold better then Windows or Mac, no one is going to bother.
Also with the launch of the mini mac if people are going to leave windows for any reason, it would be to the mac.
Companies will always want to be be working with a defined company thats there to last, not some random OSS start up.
Novel is probably one of the companies that has it most together, and they will find some market.
“the general knowledge worker perception is Linux is hard to learn.”
I disagree with this assertion. In places where I’ve worked, there were always two or three days of training.
For repetitive tasks, if a job requires to use an application such as a web browser, a word processor, a spreadsheet or else, why would it be harder to use Mozilla or OpenOffice than Internet Explorer or MS Office ? Don’t tell me that many small businesses use software like Autocad, Catia, Oracle, etc.
In Spain, the public goverment is already sending documents in OpenOffice native format rather than in MS Office.
I felt shame when I called them to ask wich format was the document they had sent me (.swx) and they told me it was OO writer. I liked it and saw it very consistent with projects (realities today) like GNU/Linex and GNU/Guadalinex (the Linux distros promoted and ‘created’ by Andalucia and Extremadura’s goverments, both are Spain’s regions, and they are the only OS present in highschools and with what students learn about computers here, it’s little by little making it’s way to being the OS used by the goverment administration. Both distros and goverment work close with Debian and Portugal and Brasil and members of Componentized linux. btw:I live in Sevilla).
I downloaded OO and tried it. I still saw it as somewhat “beta”, but I do put many hopes in OO v.2, with the new MS Access replacement, improved Writer and Calc and the posibility to program Macros in OO Basic and Java ..
I write all this because I think MS is not so safe with Office as some people here say.
That’s my opinion …