11.03.09
Novell’s PR Director and Marketing Chief Both Send the Wrong Message
Summary: Criticisms of Novell’s marketing strategy arrive early this week, even from the press
NOVELL’S attempt to save face has only led to public backlash [1, 2]. Novell ought to have silently accepted a defeat in Los Angeles [1, 2]. Instead, since Novell made a mistake, even the press is now criticising its attitude of insulting the customer. Bad, bad move from Novell’s PR Director (the heir of Bruce Lowry, who quit Novell last year).
And amidst the hype, there stood Novell spurned and nodding solemnly at the critics. In an unusual move of announcing a customer loss, the open-source firm has given LA a mild tongue-lashing about jumping aboard the cloud bandwagon.
Not only Novell’s PR Director gets criticised this week. Novell’s chief marketing officer (CMO) is now being criticised by The Source for attempting to change what FOSS means, casting Free software users as “consumers”.
John Dragoon, Novell’s Chief Marketing Officer, walks an interesting path. I first noticed his comments back when he took a swipe at Canonical while praising Microsoft’s kernel “contributions”.
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What this is about is an additional blog posting Mr. Dragoon made, “The Operating System Battle Heats Up“, where he goes just a tiny bit further and states: “While the winner on the vendor side is far from clear, it seems obvious that the consumer will win no matter what the outcome.”
This is foolish. The “consumer” – why not the “user”, I wonder? – will not win “no matter the outcome”, because the “consumer” has been losing continuously under proprietary software offerings. In fact, it is only the recent increase in “wins” from Free and Open Source Software that has in turn forced Closed and Proprietary Software to change that has led to wider consumer wins.
The so-called “new OS War” exists because the “consumer” was tired of losing as Closed and Proprietary Software “won”.
This analysis as a whole is worth a read; Novell perceives SUSE users as consumers who also “consume” licences for software patents from Novell/Microsoft. Who is Dragoon trying to appeal to? Novell does not deserve business for playing this kind of game. █
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Needs Sunlight said,
November 3, 2009 at 9:57 am
Consumer vs user, that is the heart of the matter. M$ shills want people talking only about buying, selling, leasing or renting software.
Under no circumstances should it be brought to anyone’s attention the idea of actually *using* the software. Then their whole plan goes to pieces. If people want to use the software for something, then they’ll want it to work. If they want it to work, then that rules out anything from Microsoft. Including parasitic eggs like Mono, which they hope will hatch in the body of the unwary host.
Roy Schestowitz Reply:
November 3rd, 2009 at 10:36 am
Ballmer gave away his game when he said: “The deal that we announced at the end of last year with Novell I consider to be very important. It demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property even in the Open Source world. I would not anticipate that we make a huge additional revenue stream from our Novell deal, but I do think it clearly establishes that Open Source is not free and Open Source will have to respect intellectual property rights of others just as any other competitor will.”
Source: http://www.microsoft.com/msft/download/transcripts/fy07/Financial%20Analyst%20Brief.doc