Microsoft-Novell Relationship Hits the Skids 194
Anonymous writes "According to Channelweb, the bloom might be off the rose in the Novell-Microsoft relationship: the two companies didn't sign a single, solitary large customer to a Novell Linux deal during the most recent quarter. 'So Novell, one of the biggest Linux distributors in the world, and Microsoft, one of the biggest companies in world history, couldn't find a single large customer on Planet Earth to buy into Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server software. Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian has stepped up and, rather than point fingers at Microsoft for that performance, put the blame on his company and its inability to strengthen its reseller channel.'"
Muddled Issues (Score:4, Interesting)
TFA seems to muddle together a bunch of different issues.
One is the purely Novell issue of not being good at selling stuff. Which might be true (though I spend a lot of time dealing with SLES issues at the hardware vendor I work for) but really doesn't have anything to do with the Novell-Microsoft deal.
Another issue is the core of the Novell-MS partnership: interoperability. AFAIK, that part is working well.
Finally, there's the fact that MS is committed to supported mixed Windows-SLES installation, but hasn't bothered to actually sell any SLES licenses. Really, what else do you expect? People actually making deals based on technology they've worked with for years are not going to change their strategies just because management says so. IBM never could get its people to sell OS/2 instead of Windows, and Sun salespeople often continue to push SPARC products to all their customers, even though Sun is now in the x86 business. And in the case of MS, they have particularly limited motivation to sell Linux, since doing so would not actually generate any extra profits for MS.
Re:Well, seriously... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Well, seriously... (Score:5, Interesting)
Novell should have already known the don't be a Microsoft Partner lesson. Novell owned WordPerfect when Windows 95 came out. Microsoft gave so much incorrect documentation to the WordPerfect developers, that the lawsuit [theregister.co.uk] was still going on 13 years later. In fact, the lawsuit on-going when Novell signed the Linux deal with Microsoft.
Re:Well, seriously... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd really like to explore, though the learning curve is steep. It's very frustrating going from DOS/Windows expert to Linux noob: finding an editor, then finding the config files, finding the info... Things I can do in 2 minutes in Windows take me hours, when they work at all.
I was thinking of going Ubuntu because of its success. PLus Wine for a bit of light gaming.