Bonum Certa Men Certa

Mass Exodus From Novell Products



Summary: As the company prepares for the official passage of assets to AttachMSFT [sic], its customers go elsewhere on the face of it

NOVELL is all about proprietary software, except for few areas like SUSE. So the demise of those non-free/libre products (proprietary software) is never bad news, no matter who gains at Novell's expense. The company called GroupLink was recently mentioned in relation to GroupWise and some other new press releases/articles that mentioned GroupWise were appearing in places (e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]), still offering no signs at all that anybody new is embracing GroupWise. It makes no sense given Novell's situation as a company. In fact, quite a few companies seem to be escaping GroupWise based on the news. Here is one new story about GroupWise being replaced by Microsoft:



Excel spreadsheets for customer relationship management were replaced by Salesforce.com Inc.'s hosted CRM product in less than a year. Novell Inc.'s GroupWise collaboration software was replaced by Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which was integrated with SharePoint collaboration software within a year.


Lakewood City government is also pulling the plug on Novell:

For example, the city recently switched over from a Novell computer network server to a Microsoft one.


And another example from the news:

A t the retreat, board members were briefed on an anti-bullying program and plans to switch the division's computers from a Novell operating system to one produced by Microsoft. The transition will be finished this summer and cost about $2 million, officials said.


Novell's loss is not always Microsoft's gain. Sometimes it is Google's gain as this article from a few days ago helps show:

Novell will probably be shut off for a few days after the switch, and Bonvillain said students will not be able to send e-mails from the account after this point. It may show that an e-mail has been sent, but it will likely never be received.


Novell is being stripped off in all sorts of places. As for the NOVL stock, which has little lifetime left, it is staying stable based on the most recent financial news [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. The deterioration of Novell's market may simply be in line with expectations, which are tellingly not high.

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