Novell's transition program
The new program is in response to growing customer demand for help as they make the strategic decision to transition their data center Linux infrastructure from existing third-party distributions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server." Once upon a time, distributors competed mostly against Unix and Windows; now they are starting to compete more strongly against each other.
Posted Nov 11, 2008 21:34 UTC (Tue)
by danielhedblom (guest, #47307)
[Link] (9 responses)
I highly suspect the decision to fight it out with RedHat isnt Novells but rather a key to getting all the money theyve got from Microsoft. Somehow i get the picture of Novells board yelling "Seppuku!" after having signed that agreement.
Posted Nov 11, 2008 22:08 UTC (Tue)
by niner (subscriber, #26151)
[Link] (6 responses)
Like you called them, the "already converted Linux users" may simply be _much_ easier
So the decision to not ignore a large potential customer group seems pretty standard
Posted Nov 11, 2008 22:30 UTC (Tue)
by rahvin (guest, #16953)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Nov 12, 2008 15:54 UTC (Wed)
by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
[Link] (4 responses)
I'm really skeptic about that.
It's my perception that FOSS companies do not really compete in features among them, but rather in trustiness and service quality.
On the other hand, FOSS companies do compete in features and price with _closed_ source companies, not in isolation but as a group. That's the nature of open source development.
Personally I think that, to keep innovation up, we just need to put a Linux development environment into each bright person's computer. And one can argue that prices can hardly be any lower...
Posted Nov 12, 2008 16:32 UTC (Wed)
by lmb (subscriber, #39048)
[Link] (3 responses)
On the engineering side, cooperation prevails. (Look at the recent dialogue on clustering, for instance.) Still, some times competition happens - for potential employees, between differing solutions to problems, deciding on different OSS projects, etcetera. And possibly merging ways again when the differentiation is decided to no longer be cost-efficient, or a clear technological winner has emerged. That is simply sound and rational engineering.
Marketing is the same. Yes, there is is joint competition against the other incumbents, such as Microsoft and Solaris. But when you look at a specific sale or contract, each of the companies competes against _all_ others; that is a reality no for profit company can ignore, either. Not just price. A big part of this is services (as the power of the technology is largely equivalent) - how easy is it to buy from a given company? How much will they help me with the pain of transition?
Linux companies are uniquely positioned to ease transition from other Linux vendors, exactly because the technology situation. It would be much more difficult to provide transitional support for a Solaris or Windows customer. So Oracle does UBL, and I'd not be surprised to see more such offers being made official from more companies - as it is clearly already happening in practice, anyway.
And, hey, that is one of the key reasons why some customers decide on Linux: less vendor lock-in, which is exactly what such an announcement proves, and as such could make Linux even more attractive to some. "Woah, indeed, no vendor lock-in, not just talk!"
It doesn't need any conspiracy theory, really, nor does this mean that anyone has hard feelings for one another, or that engineers would cooperate less; the business rationale seems to make sense to me.
(And no, I'm not speaking for Novell, just voicing my own thoughts.)
Posted Nov 12, 2008 17:39 UTC (Wed)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (1 responses)
I most everything people do cooperation is essential. It doesn't really matter a whole lot if your competing companies or not. Or scientists or whatever.
There is this prevailing attitude with American businessmen that high degree of competitiveness is essential in having a successful business. For example, you have 'Sun Tzu's Art of War' was a huge fad among businessmen, teaching themselves the art of deception and all that happy horseshit. Well the book itself teaches that this is for war only and is destructive and counter-productive in all other times, but people seem to miss that lesson. (and the flip side.. having compassion, honesty, and tolerance is good assets to have, unless your in war which then they become deadly mistakes (war is bad m'kay...))
Well this is a mistaken viewpoing IMO. It's a whole bunch of ignorance and arrogance to view that goes along with that sort of viewpoint. This sort of thinking is done out of this idea of 'American Superiority' in business and innovation, which is a myth. You end up with people on the top that are arrogant and blind to what is happening around them. They figure what they need to do is destroy the opposing force, rather then pleasing their customers, people that think they are sublime geniuses in business and think that the company's success is due to their intelligence and foresight while the company's failure is due to circumstances outside of their control.
They don't notice that the success of the company is due to their workers, their 'peons'. Their job as businessmen and managers is to help the workers do what workers want... which is to create a high quality product on time and with minimal fuss and misery.
The trick to business is that you simply out-compete the other people. They are not your enemies, but if you can do a better job then do a better job. This doesn't mean that it's a us vs them, it just means that you do a better job.
Higher levels of quality, higher levels of production, better value, more innovation (in products, quality, and production), better customer service. That's what is required to be successful. 'Quality is Job 1' sort of thing.
Posted Nov 12, 2008 18:27 UTC (Wed)
by lmb (subscriber, #39048)
[Link]
And of course, marketing folks try their best to explain the choices to the customer, and sales tries to answer all questions they still might have. Making customers aware of their choices is competition (with all other bidders, implicitly), but is it harmful?
I am not american, so I prefer not to comment on your assessment of american businessmen, but I would dare say that competition is not inherently negative - just like some people only seem to read parts of The Art of War or The Prince, some people seem to be looking at only part of what "competition" might mean.
Posted Dec 25, 2008 18:01 UTC (Thu)
by anomalizer (✭ supporter ✭, #53112)
[Link]
Posted Nov 12, 2008 0:22 UTC (Wed)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 12, 2008 4:06 UTC (Wed)
by proski (subscriber, #104)
[Link]
Posted Nov 12, 2008 15:14 UTC (Wed)
by mattdm (subscriber, #18)
[Link]
Posted Nov 22, 2008 15:43 UTC (Sat)
by dag- (guest, #30207)
[Link]
Red Hat's strategy is to avoid lock-in by using open source and open standards and moving away from and replacing closed proprietary solutions. Novell's strategy is to move Linux closer to Microsoft lock-in.
This strategy is also apparent with Red Hat consistently buying software and open sourcing it, where Novell is busy creating and buying proprietary software and causing vendor lock-in hand-in-hand with Steve Ballmer.
As a company you have to ask yourself what position you would rather be in.
Novell's transition program
Novell's transition program
without any need for conspiracy theories:
to get than the hard to convince "Microsoft slaves". So even as the latter are so much
more, there may be some serious money to gain by pursuing the first group. It certainly
works on small scale: Windows users often have to be persuaded to try Linux, while
users of other distributions sometimes just have to see how well the one you're using
works, to give it a try.
business to me. It may not be good for the community, but it's certainly something a
business has to consider.
Novell's transition program
Novell's transition program
Novell's transition program
Novell's transition program
Novell's transition program
Novell's transition program
Novell's transition program
only releasing clients and tools for Suse Linux and not a single other distribution
What do you mean by this? If it's free software, you can easily build and run it on any distribution you like. If it's non-free, that is a far more serious problem than being merely distro-specific.
I think this particular "tool" is quite pointless on anything but SUSE :-)
Novell's transition program
Novell's transition program
Novell's transition program