Novell shares fall on drop in Linux-products revenue (CentreDaily.com) [LWN.net]

CentreDaily.com reports on a drop in Novell's stock price. "Novell Inc. stock plunged Thursday after the networking-software maker said second-quarter revenue from Linux products had slipped from the previous quarter. At midday, Novell shares dropped $1.35, or 17.5 percent, to $6.38 on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The amount of the revenue decline was not specified in a conference call held Wednesday after the financial markets closed. ``We're signing a lot of longer-term contracts where the revenue recognition gets pushed out,'' Chairman and Chief Executive Jack Messman said."

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Novell shares fall on drop in Linux-products revenue (CentreDaily.com)

Posted Jun 1, 2006 23:31 UTC (Thu) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link] (6 responses)

Well what do you expect after the way there customers (many of us loyal to them for a good number of years) have been treated with this so called release of Suse 10.1 , It is so un-ready for release it is unbelieveable to find ot released .

With so much not working or hardly working zen/rug cockup plus many more pieces . I now know one thing boy am i glad i did NOT purchase 10.1 i did piurchase SuSe 10.0 and unless they get there act sorted i will not buy another version and there are a lot of loyal users that feel the same way so far it seems suse/novell are happy to just try sweeping the comnplaints under the carpet but if you got shares sell them cus things are not looking rosey

Pete .

Novell shares fall on drop in Linux-products revenue (CentreDaily.com)

Posted Jun 2, 2006 0:55 UTC (Fri) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link] (2 responses)

10.1 does have a problem with the last minute insertion of the zenworks stuff into the package management system, but they are working on it and are committed to getting it right. I'll reserve judgement and cut them some slack on this one, since SuSE is still a very good distro IMHO, and one mishap does not ruin them in my eyes.

10.1 has problems ok ..

Posted Jun 3, 2006 10:25 UTC (Sat) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link] (1 responses)

10.1 has problems ok just got have a look at the suse lists i have had to ban a lot of threads due to the ammount of traffic on the updater KDE Xgl/Kompiz
plus a whols host of other stuff .

Novell i notice seem ti have hired a few new names to try and quite the complaints on the list down but they are failing miserably i maintain that 10.1 was not anywhere near fit for release Esp as a PURCHASED package maybe as a download where you gets what you pays for but to expect people to PAY for something that broken is not on at all (maybe they are trying to emulate microslops) .

I will not buy 10.1 i tried the download version not a lot better I will wait till 10.2 or whatever comes out see what transpires then if it is no good then it has got to be bye bye Novell have fun but you aint makin another bean outta me whats neede AFAIAC is an INDEPENDANT SuSe once again free from the control of corperate shits ..

Pete .

10.1 has problems ok ..

Posted Jun 5, 2006 1:06 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Wasn't Suse corporate from the beginning? I figured they were incorporated right off the bat in Germany. I'd hate to start a software company without the indemification that being incorporated provides...

I think that Novell is just learning how to do stuff. I think that they didn't realise the hell they were going to get themselves into by advertising XGL as a release item when it realy is still very beta.

You simply just don't _do_ that.

Seriously. A hell of a lot of people who don't know Linux very well are all about trying out Suse just because of the eye candy. It's a huge attraction. So your getting a horrid mix of people who are fairly new to Linux trying to do something that is fairly beta that usually involves installing questionable propriatory kernel models.

What I would do if I was Novell would be this:

A. Cut my losses with Suse and join in on Ubuntu. Concentrate on improving Novell's propriatory software compatability and try to get cool parts working on a full free software platform. Like their Novel network file system.. It's very advanced, much more then either NFS or Samba. And people like good, stable, and secure file systems.

I'd keep something called 'Suse' though.

Also avoid getting hung up on the whole 'Linux' moniker. Along with teaming up with Ubuntu you can maybe flirt with Sun and their open solaris/sparc platform for high end database stuff.

Seriously. Work on high compatability with Debian. Let Debian/Ubuntu do all the work on stabilizing the operating system, that's a waste of time for Suse-folks to do it if other people are better and are willing to do the work. Work on stabilizing new stuff like XGL, key-based authentication infrastructure and whatnot.

B. Adopt Kubuntu in a big way and work heavily on helping stabilizing the next-generation QT4-based KDE platform and get good integration with Mono and other stuff into that desktop environment like they did with Gnome. Take the best parts of Gnome and work it into KDE and visa versa. Work on the portland stuff. Make KDE users happy and they'll flock to your operating system and they are huge fanboys and will make a good grassroots following.

C. Continue to work on items that attract Windows users and developers to Linux. Stuff like .NET compatability with Mono. Flashy graphics, fast desktops. Exchange replacements. Higher office suite compatability. Develop more tools to make packages that are very highly compatable and make it easier to make packages that work with other operating systems.. including Redhat.

Stuff like that.

D. Learn from Redhat and Redhat's mistakes with the Redhat 7, 8, 9 releases. Stability should be a very very high priority in a consumer supported release. Look at Windows and see the benifits of having a long lasting platform that a company then can turn around and feel safe in commiting large amounts of resources into adopting. People want something that just works and there are no suprises. Even if their are bugs and stuff that you have to work around that's preferable on the long term then always getting hit by small (bad) suprises.

That's my theory on the subject.

Novell shares fall on drop in Linux-products revenue (CentreDaily.com)

Posted Jun 2, 2006 12:23 UTC (Fri) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

They know, that it was wrong to introduce this change so late in the cycle. If you talk to the developers on IRC, they will admit that readily.

But apart from package management, everything works pretty nice actually. knetworkmanager alone is a gift :)
Though I still do not use it on my servers. Staying on 10.0 for the time being.

Novell Linux-products: marketing dept. is in charge

Posted Jun 3, 2006 13:01 UTC (Sat) by carcassonne (guest, #31569) [Link]

They know, that it was wrong to introduce this change so late in the cycle

It means one thing: marketing is in charge.

And that's not good at all.

In every company there must be a buffer between marketing and product development, for the sake of the product's quality.

Novell shares fall on drop in Linux-products revenue (CentreDaily.com)

Posted Jun 3, 2006 14:36 UTC (Sat) by kitterma (guest, #4448) [Link]

I tried SuSE 10.1 and am still using it as of this writing. I've never used SuSE before and never will again. It's working well enough for the moment, but the whole package management disaster means that it will not be on my desktop for long. It's nice, but if I can't update it, it can't stay.

I don't have enough experience with SuSE to understand what went wrong. It does not appear to me based on this one experience that they have any idea what testing prior to release means.

This is the first non-Debian derived distro I've tried. It may well be the last.

Don't read too much into this

Posted Jun 2, 2006 4:49 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Many software companies have been moving to a revenue recognition model that divides the money over the life of the contract. The reason for this is in part to smooth out the ups and downs, but mainly to keep large customers from engaging in blackmail at the end of the quarter: give us a massive discount now, or no deal. If (to use a standard practice) three-year agreements are paid off in twelve quarterly chunks, the customer only has 1/12 the leverage he did before, and the vendor can tell the customer to come back Monday and pay list price.

The problem is, when the company transitions from the traditional pay-up-front model to the time-based model, revenue goes down for the first year even if business is good.

Now, I'm saying this without any particular knowledge of how well Novell is doing. But it does appear that Novell is trying this move.

Novell shares fall on drop in Linux-products revenue (CentreDaily.com)

Posted Jun 3, 2006 2:04 UTC (Sat) by carcassonne (guest, #31569) [Link]

I consider the bright side: for about a year I've been using SuSE (9.3 and 10.0 in x86 and x86_64 configurations at home and at work) and the new 10.1 that I've freshly downloaded in these two flavours just gives me that push I needed to go back to the Linux From Scratch systems I ran for 4 years (both at home and at work). I just needed that extra push to get the effort going to build up-to-date LFS systems again and SuSE 10.1 gave it.

What is this push exactly ?

The following:

10.1 gives a blank screen 'out of range' TFT error on the Viewsonic 21.3" monitor when trying to install x86 on a x86 machine. No other SuSE or Linux system ever did that on that very basic ASUS Celeron machine.

10.1 in X86_64 configuration with Gnome selected as desktop (but choosing also full KDE during install) refuses to start konsole.

10.1 in X86_64 mode still has problem seeing the two network interfaces (thinking there's only one in YaST but assigning the same IP to both eth0 and eth1 in the end) on the MSI K8N Neo4 board (previous version of SuSE also has problems but I can fix it) but this time around it is not possible to fix - at least quickly - with the net result that Firefox cannot access the internet. Big bummer.

10.1 in X86_64 mode, Sax2 is showing that the X server config is 1600x1024 but it is actually 1024x768 and it cannot be chnaged to 1620x1024 after multiple tries. I did not want to change the xorg.conf file manually. This is not home-made LFS, this is a Big Time distro.

So you know, time to fiddle around is scarce and I much prefer spending that time having fun with wxWidgets, Perl and POE than to try to make SuSE 10.1 work.

Well, now replace wxWidgets, Perl and POE by getting a new LFS system built ! ,-)

I don't know what the strategy of Novell is, but if I were working at SuSE since many years in Germany I'd be kinda ashamed of what they're doing to what was a good distro. I hope they'll get better with 10.2 and 10.3, but this 10.1 is all I needed to make me stick with 10.0 until I build LFS systems again. Period.

Now, how do I mix lib and lib32 ? Or is it lib64 and lib ? ,-)