12.15.06

Novell Fuels Microsoft’s FUD, Again

Posted in FSF, FUD, Servers, Virtualisation at 5:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Damage, damage, damage. That appears to be the only thing Novell does nowadays. Egocentrically it aspires to boost its profits while throwing Microsoft’s myths up in the air. Here’s a new writeup from Lxer.

As I was reading through the latest paper edition of Computer Weekly I came across a story about Novell and their new interoperability drive with Microsoft. You’ve probably read more than I have on the subject. My tolerance for propaganda is thin on the ground.

Then I came across this statement from Microsoft’s Bill Hilf. “I have seen in more than 13 years of working in Open Source that the free software audience is becoming smaller.”

At which point I started to get angry. This is untrue – surely? It ignores all the growth of OpenSource in the “third world”, all the change-overs in European governments and schools. In fact it ignores just about everything that’s happened in the last 2-3 years.

Ok, this is propaganda – plain and simple. Designed to make users think that Linux is good for nothing other than servers. And that it’s only “safe and reliable” if it’s running in a nice Windows environment. This sort of blatant lying I expect from Microsoft, but how does Novell fit into this? Bent over a barrel sans clothing I suspect.

[...]

The article goes on to quote Mr. Levy (of Novell); “Microsoft hopes to drive all those customers to virtualise Linux on Windows”

Read this writeup in its entirety and let it be your eye-opener.

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Recent Events and Articles

Posted in HP, IBM, Novell, UNIX at 2:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Structural and secreterial changes in Novell this week:

• Novell Inc. Board OKs Election Change (more formally covered here)
• Novell Appoints Volker Smid as President, Novell EMEA

Weekend ‘reading list’:

• Payback time for Novell. This particular article should be taken with a grain of salt because it comes from a notorious Linux basher—Tom Yager.
• Microsoft, HP expand business alliance. This one revolves around sales of Microsoft products (exclusively), as means of battling IBM. We covered the vague preceding announcement a couple of days ago.

Additional remark: the event-driven and release-sensitive DistroWatch currently ranks Opensuse first. This 1^st place comes with a strong condition. Unsurprisingly, this occurred around the time of the most recent release. Bear in mind, therefore, that it occupies the first spot for a one-week average, but whether it’s sustainable once the hype has faded and the reviews have aged is another key question.

New distributions with newer packages are due to be released soon. Thus, these figures are misleading and serve as a poor overall indicator. DistroWatch have long-term averages that better reflect on a momentumless state. This clarifications is an important one because Novell is likely to spin arbitrary observations in their favour, just as they did early in the week.

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Novell/Microsoft ‘Study’ Reveals More Than Intended

Posted in Deals, Deception, Marketing at 3:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

It is beginning to seem as though the Novell- and Microsoft-funded study was bound to backfire.

A jointly sponsored Microsoft and Novell survey purporting strong customer support for the companies’ controversial alliance looks like back firing on Novell.

While the poll of 201 IT executives with “significant” purchasing power found near unanimous support for interoperability between Linux and Windows, relatively few said they’d actually pick Novell’s SuSE Linux Server (SLES) as a result of the deal.

Pay careful attention to that second paragraph. Clearly, the study was using a flawed method to achieve the desired results. Moreover, among the many flaws, one third of the surveyed people did not even know about the deal prior to questioning. It is therefore likely that these people were not technically-oriented or well-informed. would you truly expect them to comprehend the principles of Free software if for over a month they never heard about the deal? Therein lies just one flaw among many. Novell must be learning from its partner, with whom it conducted this study. Here is a recent short article which appeared in Yahoo! News.

Microsoft Press Releases: Read Between the Lines

We have a game we play around the office here with Microsoft press releases. The game is called Find the words that make the headline true. It’s not always easy.

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Our point: Microsoft has a long history of using press releases to promote their product momentum in shall we say interesting ways, using words like “fastest growing” (meaning, the number we started with was really really small) to redefining words such as “sold.” It’s not good marketing practice. Why? Because once consumers and press people figure out you are playing lawyer, they stop believing you and your brand. And that’s more likely to do you harm than good.

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