08.11.10
Posted in Free/Libre Software, Google, Novell at 5:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell is trying to wrest control of Wave (just like it does when it comes to OpenOffice.org), but as Novell’s future is uncertain this is too risky to embrace
IN OUR most recent posts about Novell’s Pulse — posts which came immediately after Wave’s death (or at least its demise at Google [1, 2, 3, 4]) — we showed that Novell plans to carry on with Pulse. But here is an observation which is curious. From a few days ago:
The Novell Pulse group collaborated with the Google Wave team, We asked if they felt Google had killed Google Wave too early Andy Fox, vice president of engineering at Novell, said he was not surprised they pulled the plug.
Novell is apparently hoping to pick up the work of Google, capitalising on many hours of work done by another company (think along the lines of Novell using Red Hat’s work).
“Novell Pulse has Heartbeat Despite Google Wave’s Death” says the headline from Matthew Weinberger, who writes: “where Wave was aimed at consumers, Novell Pulse is designed for enterprise customers, stacking on top of their existing Microsoft Exchange (or GroupWise, or Lotus Notes, or…) deployments, and providing enough security and identity to attain full compliance with corporate policy. And Novell says that’s all the difference they need.”
There is other new coverage about it this week [1, 2, 3]. From eWEEK:
Despite the demise of Google Wave, Novell Systems will continue working to bring its Novell Pulse real-time collaboration platform to the market. Novell competes with Google, Microsoft and IBM in collaboration software.
The thing about Pulse is, now that Novell is having business/financial difficulties (it is looking for a buyer), what kind of enterprise would put its data — such as sensitive communications — in Novell’s hands? Novell also uses Wave within a proprietary infrastructure such as GroupWise. It’s lock-in. █
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell at 5:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell is spreading Mono to Macs while it also promotes Microsoft’s Visual Studio and gets special attention from the Redmond press
THE PROBLEMS with Mono have been covered by Techrights since 2006. Sites like CIOL are still promoting Mono Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 in this week’s news, but what we found most interesting is that John K. Waters from the 'Microsoft press' joins the likes of Worthington (big Mono booster [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]) and promotes Mono for Macs, despite the fact that Apple is resistant to it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8].
When I heard that Novel was set to unveil version 2.0 of its Mono Tools for Visual Studio, I was looking forward to chatting about the release with the manic Miguel de Icaza, original leader of the open-source Mono project, vice of Novell’s Developer Platform group and super-fun interviewee.
For those who don’t know, Miguel de Icaza is a Microsoft MVP. No wonder the ‘Microsoft press’ (Redmond) “look[ed] forward to chatting” with him.
The Source has this new short post about Mono; therein it is shown that critics of Mono or GNOME-Do are collectively dismissed as “haters”.
Now what does this say coming out of the mouth of someone who uses MONO as the wonderful gift to bring the “loved by all” technology to the world in the form of Gnome DO?
A lot of people who use GNOME-Do did not know about Mono or did not know that GNOME-Do is Mono based. █
“Our partnership with Microsoft continues to expand.”
–Ron Hovsepian, Novell CEO
“[The partnership with Microsoft is] going very well insofar as we originally agreed to co-operate on three distinct projects and now we’re working on nine projects and there’s a good list of 19 other projects that we plan to co-operate on.”
–Ron Hovsepian, Novell CEO
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, SLES/SLED at 5:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell’s team of experts is gradually disintegrating
ONCE in a while we learned about former Novell employees who left the company very quietly. Dr. Jeff Jaffe, Novell’s CTO, quit the company several months ago and based on this new article from Bill Claybrook (“Deciphering Red Hat’s cloud computing strategy”), he too “resigned his competitive analyst/Linux product marketing position at Novell in June 2009 after spending over four and a half years at the company.”
Previously we wrote about Tech Data’s relationship with Novell [1, 2, 3, 4] and days ago in the news we found a personal link too:
The unit is being led by Sathya Murthy, who previously worked for Tech Data, Novell and more recently Magirus, where he managed the company’s VMware business.
This is not anything major, but still, it is worth keeping track of. █
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Posted in Finance, Novell at 4:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Novell is informing investors and clients in advance that its financial results will be terrible
ACCORDING to this new press release from Novell, there are tough times over there. As Reuters puts it [1, 2]:
Business software maker Novell Inc (NOVL.O) cut its third-quarter revenue outlook due to customer uncertainty surrounding its plan to explore strategic alternatives, including a sale of itself.
In March, the company spurned a $2 billion takeover offer from investment fund Elliott Associates, calling the bid inadequate. Its board instead decided to review alternatives, including a share buyback, cash dividend, joint ventures, recapitalization, alliances or an outright sale.
Timothy Prickett Morgan has an excellent article about it. “What a surprise,” he writes, “A company rejects an unsolicited takeover bid and its board of directors announces that the struggling company is looking at all alternatives, including selling itself or breaking itself up. And then sales unexpectedly go south.”
The Wall Street Journal speaks about customer uncertainty and this is also covered in:
Jefferies says: “we remain concerned over the company’s deteriorating fundamentals and pace of customer defection.” █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, OpenSUSE at 4:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: OpenSUSE turns 5 years old, SUSE Appliance turns 1 year old, and the future of SUSE may depend only on Novell, which is up for sale
JUST in case it matters, it was 5 years ago that OpenSUSE was created to give the illusion that SUSE was not under Novell’s control. The truth of the matter is that Novell legally owns “OpenSUSE” (the trademark) and thus has the ability to sell OpenSUSE, maybe to Canonical [1, 2]. From the OMG!SUSE Web site:
A short five years ago, on 9th August 2005 the openSUSE Project was announced. While SuSE Linux has been around for over 15 years, it was only during the past five years that the openSUSE project was created as an independent organization.
SUSE Appliance has also just celebrated its first birthday:
From a distribution perspective, Markus Rex, senior vice president and general manager of open platform solutions at Novell, will be taking the LinuxCon stage to update the Linux community on where he sees the future of the platform heading. Novell has been pushing a message of workload management with Linux as a core component, while software appliances have also been a big push for Novell with its SUSE Appliance effort, which recently celebrated its first anniversary.
Novell, which is up for sale, may have to decide to put SUSE on sale. Several months ago Novell emphasised in the press that it had finally turned SUSE into a profitable business (after failing to do so for years). According to this, “The openSUSE Boosters team is preparing for their presence at FrOSCon, which will be held on 21st and 22nd of August 2010 in Sankt Augustin near Bonn, Germany.”
“OpenSUSE Boosters” is an interesting name because it brings out the meaning which we hope to convey when we say “Microsoft boosters”. It is a very polite term. █
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Posted in Deception, Marketing, Microsoft at 3:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A small group which publicly presents itself as “INDEPENDENT” (all caps) is actually complementary to Microsoft’s business
LAST year we pointed out very briefly that Directions on Microsoft calls itself “INDEPENDENT” (yes, they use all caps) even though its entire business is based on Microsoft. Now comes the time for Paul DeGroot et al. to give a promotional Microsoft seminar (their Microsoft seminars are scheduled every now and then) and Mary Jo Foley helps DeGroot by drawing attention to it all (she is also complementary to Microsoft’s business). This time it’s about “cut[ting] a carrot from its Software Assurance licensing plan”, which is Microsoft’s way of squeezing a lot of money out of corporations and have them obliged (locked in) for a long time to come. Microsoft could sure use these services from Directions on Microsoft, especially now that it’s cutting expenses by laying people off and replacing some of them with cheaper labour. █
“Gates, who had told Eller on a number of occasions that he longed to do a deal with the Russians because they were well educated and their labor was cheap, sat in on the meeting.”
–Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, a book composed
by the daughter of Microsoft’s Pam Edstrom
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Posted in Mail, Microsoft, Servers, Virtualisation, VMware, Windows at 3:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How individuals who are paid or were paid by Microsoft just carry on making Microsoft stronger
HERE WE go again. The Gartner Group and Forrester, which Microsoft pays a lot of money to advance Microsoft’s agenda, are recommending Microsoft products, even those that do not quite succeed in the market [1, 2]. There is a lot more coverage about it. Paying analysts sure pays off and the term "analyst tax" is beginning to make a lot more sense.
Separately, one ought to realise that VMware can hardly make GNU/Linux-related announcements anymore, not after former Microsoft executives took over the company. This is some interesting issue because VMware is said to have violated the GPL when it ripped apart Linux to create some of its products. To quote the news from IDG:
VMware’s classic ESX hypervisor includes a user space environment, known as the Console Operating System (COS) or Service Console, which is derived from a distribution of Linux. It’s used as both a bootstrap for the VMware kernel and as a management interface that could be automated and queried against using Linux-style commands and scripts.
IDG also has this article about VMware and Microsoft Exchange. VMware bought a major rival of Microsoft Exchange some months ago. Remember Zimbra? There has been nothing from Zimbra in the news [1, 2], not since VMware bought it and VMware’s parent company actively promoted Microsoft Exchange. Could the former Microsoft executives who run VMware have paid $100 million dollars to just bury Zimbra and protect Microsoft's unreliable cash cow? We hope not.
Here is one last article from IDG, titled “Microsoft: VMware customers are ‘Windows customers first’” (again promoting Windows).
But Microsoft will maintain a limited presence at VMworld in San Francisco Aug. 30 to Sept. 2, as it did last year, and make its pitch to VMware customers. VMware, by the way, is led by CEO Paul Maritz, a former Microsoft official.
What could possibly go wrong when Microsoft people run both Microsoft and its competition? Or when Microsoft is paying ‘independent’ analysts… █
“In January of 1994, Waggener Edstrom began recruiting 100 key editors, 32 analysts, and 150 third-party vendors for the Windows 95 bandwagon. Lining up the national media and the business press was easy. Edstrom had been massaging those relationships for over a decade, sending flowers and cartoons and reminding editors of their spouses’ birthdays and wedding anniversaries, earning her “Gates’s keeper” reputation. Not only would these people tout Windows 95, they would also be more inclined to show sympathy for Microsoft when competitors started ragging them.”
–Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, a book composed
by the daughter of Microsoft’s Pam Edstrom
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Google, Mail, Microsoft at 2:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
[nelson voice]Haha![/nelson voice]
Summary: Microsoft staff is once again recommending the competition’s Web browser
HAVING BEEN acquired by Microsoft, Hotmail is a disaster. It was ahead of the pack when Microsoft bought it and it also ran Free software. Right now it is still a mess because it’s in Microsoft’s hands.
The Vole’s web-base email service, which used to run on FreeBSD servers, had been looking decidedly tacky compared to Google’s Gmail. That is until Microsoft realised it was time to wave the decorator’s brush over it to try to win back users.
We have just learned from this report that Microsoft recommends using Chrome to overcome Hotmail issues:
Microsoft has advised Hotmail users struggling to access their email accounts to surf via Google’s Chrome browser in order to successfully connect to the recently overhauled service.
The software vendor finally rolled out its latest version of Hotmail to its 350 million users last week, but since then the company has faced plenty of complaints from disgruntled customers unhappy with the new interface.
Many have griped that emails have disappeared and that scripting errors in Hotmail prevent them from composing new messages.
Others cannot access their accounts at all, and the grumbles are continuing to mount up in the Hotmail forums.
“This is good,” Chips B. Malroy explained last night because Microsoft “has to use a Google product to fix their updates on Hotmail.
“Why not just switch from Hotmail to Gmail in the first place?” █
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