NOVELL'S DEAL with Microsoft was not a success. Companies, like people, love to justify their own decision-making, but the reality of the matter is that Novell did not gain an edge over its main competitor, Red Hat.

Ron Hovsepian, Jeff Jaffe et al put more patent emphasis in Novell's strategy, having arrived from IBM where software patents are seen as acceptable. Last year we wrote about the motives of the deal and there were shades of SCO in that one (SCO ended up going bankrupt, having gotten miserable and sold away its technical soul^*).

Novell's new strategy was to market itself with Microsoft, maybe even to fight GNU/Linux on its behalf. "Novell was great in the old times but it's making very odd commercial money-grabbing moves," says a source to us.

Despite the characteristic damage control, Novell's demise is near. Even the CEO admitted that more layoffs are coming, according to credible reports. ⬆