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Only three issues of the NetWare Tips Newsletter to go after this one, and based on last week’s “preliminary” financial reports it’s probably a toss-up if Novell will last into the New Year. While the company did report a small profit in its fourth quarter, it was below Wall Street’s expectations and came from revenue well down from the same period last year.
There are also continuing worries about Novell’s possible problems with stock options over the past 10 years which the company continues to investigate. The headline on a Smart Money story probably said it best: “Novell Appears Unwell”.
Interestingly enough, the company blamed “diminishing sales of its NetWare products” for the poor showing. But, let me ask you, if a company was actively discouraging you from buying a product would you insist on it anyway? It’s extremely disingenuous for the company to do everything it can to discourage NetWare sales, then blame the ensuing drop in sales for the poor performance. To me that says it has no viable plan to replace those lost sales.
In other news last week, Novell announced that version 2 of Open Enterprise Server would ship next year. That’s a bit of a delay - not as much as, say, a Microsoft operating system though! The announcement confirmed that there’ll be no more NetWare kernel included but that: “The next version will complete the shift to workgroup services running completely on the Linux platform. Open Enterprise Server 2 will make traditional NetWare workgroup services run on Linux as well or better than they do on NetWare.”
Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. He's written a number of books including the (sadly) now out of print "Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks." His musings can be found at Virtual Quill.
Kearns is the author of two Network World Newsletters: Windows Networking Strategies, and Identity Management. Comments about these newsletters should be sent to him at these respective addresses: windows@vquill.com, identity@vquill.com .
Kearns provides content services to network vendors: books, manuals, white papers, lectures and seminars, marketing, technical marketing and support documents. Virtual Quill provides "words to sell by..." Find out more by e-mail.
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Copyright 2008 Network World Inc.
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Novell reports a profit, misses an opportunity By Anonymous on December 14, 2006, 11:18 pm Reply | Read entire comment Is anyone out there still deploying NetWare? Re: This article.
Yep By Adam Gaffin on December 15, 2006, 9:11 am Reply | Read entire comment See this post.
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