* What happened to Novell in 2004
2004 was a year of great transition for Novell. There’s the transformation from a proprietary NetWare operating system into the much more open systems oriented Open Enterprise Server, for one thing. There was also the “transition” of Chris Stone – from Novell employee to ex-Novell employee.
At least one pundit (Chris Preimesberger, in IT Managers’ Journal) allowed this one incident to so impact the year at Novell that he used it to indict the company’s CEO as one of “The Worst 5 IT Managers of 2004,” saying “How could he let a bright young talent like Chris Stone get away like that?” Of course, one reader of the Journal commented that Stone got it backwards: “He wanted Messman’s job and when Messman told him that he wasn’t going to retire anytime soon…Stone pitched a temper tantrum and bailed.”
The reality is that it doesn’t seem to have made a difference which explanation (or some combination of both) is true – it may well be the biggest non-story of the year for Novell. Only time will tell, of course, especially what happens with Open Enterprise Server one or two years down the road. I expect that by March, at BrainShare, we’ll be hearing more about the OES roadmap and can begin to judge whether the absence of Stone will make a difference.
Another big story from 2004 was Novell’s filing of a lawsuit against Microsoft charging that the Redmond behemoth had withheld critical technical information that impaired Novell’s ability to develop new competitive versions of its WordPerfect software (see my thoughts on this suit in https://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/netware/2004/1122nw1.html).
Just last week, Microsoft asked the federal court to dismiss the anti-trust lawsuit, saying in a court filing that Novell long ago sold away any rights it had to make new allegations of unfair trade practices. According to a story in the Salt Lake Tribune (see link below): “Microsoft argues that a 1996 deal with Caldera ended any rights Novell had to pursue damages related to personal computer operating systems. Further, Microsoft attorney John McKay contends that Novell’s sale of WordPerfect and the Quattro Pro spreadsheet program to Corel in 1996 makes pursuit of damages for those products ‘time-barred’ because the four-year statute of limitations on such claims has long since expired.”
I don’t expect the judge to throw out the suit, but it would probably be incumbent on Novell to pursue a settlement with Microsoft.
2005 should be at least as interesting a year for Novell, especially the early part when Open Enterprise Server begins to ship. Do you have your public beta copy yet?
