Summary: A look at some of the ways Novell promotes itself, including the more controversial means

Novell's channel is a mess and repeated departures did not help; Novell just couldn't retain someone in the key role (Channel Chief) and it's probably worst in the UK [1, 2]. So John Dragoon, who is now listed as Channel Chief, has hired someone from Microsoft to help with Novell's channel. This is just one among several Microsoft executives who entered Novell in recent years, which may explain the company's misguided direction. Anyway, here is the news page confirming Dragoon's role: (also here)

-- John Dragoon, Senior Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer and Channel Chief, Novell

The VAR Guy is still sucking up to him, just as before. But it's probably because both are focused on the channel/VARs.

What we found more curious though is that either Novell or sites like TechRepublic are once again bumping up anti-Red Hat "whitepapers" (latest examples are [1, 2]) and Novell has been paying IDC to have this item pushed up in ZDNet (collaborator of TechRepublic). Over at its PR blog, Novell wrote the following:

Paul Rubens over at ServerWatch wrote an interesting article on a recent Red Hat webinar designed to to discourage customers from migrating to 3rd party supported Red Hat distributions. Novell has just such a program with our SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Subscription with Expanded Support initiative.

According to Paul’s article, third-party branded support was described as “High risk” or “Pay and pray.”

"Novell is now literally spamming comments sections on articles and blog posts," says Ryan, our reader. "Scroll down to "By Mona Chadha, Novell February 24 2010 3:49 PMPDT" ... Novell's PR splog is funny. They use it as a soapbox to harass customers that leave too." Yes, we wrote about this in [1, 2, 3, 4]. It was about Los Angeles.

"Novell is now literally spamming comments sections on articles and blog posts."
      --RyanIs it not pathetic that Novell is so blatantly slamming Red Hat and Google while keeping so polite towards its sugar daddy, Microsoft? OpenSUSE too has "boosters" (that's what they call themselves) running out there and serving Novell's agenda for nothing in return. From their latest update:

What are the boosters up to?

[...]

The last sprint was going from February 4th to February 16th. Even though it included all of us going to FOSDEM over the first weekend we were able to reach one milestone: Buildservice Project

How about this for a thought?

For corporations like Compaq and Novell, good public exposure means big bucks. And with teens being one of the largest shopping demographics in the world, Novell and Compaq could stand to make millions of dollars.

Well, changing perception [1, 2] the way Novell does it is simply dishonest and it's fake. More people deserve to know this. ⬆