* InfoWorld critiques Novell CEO's BrainShare keynote
Last week, I read a column by InfoWorld Associate Editor Neil McAllister (see link below). (I read a reprint of his InfoWorld column in LinuxWorld Australia.) McAllister covers, mostly, open source topics but he did head to BrainShare this year.
He says that although he was encouraged by Novell’s announcements he wonders who, now that Chris Stone and Alan Nugent have left, will champion Novell’s open source initiatives to its installed user base. He thinks Novell is making the right moves, but, well, here’s McAllister’s own words:
“As I said, all the right moves – and yet, despite the encouraging news from BrainShare, I still couldn’t shed my skepticism. As I watched [Jack] Messman’s [Novell’s CEO] keynote, I saw a man clearly unaccustomed to addressing the public, a man who flubbed his lines and spoke with the cadence of a trained politician, not with the unabashed zeal of a [Nat] Friedman [co-creator of Ximian, now a Novell VP and the driving force behind Novell’s Hula project] or [Miquel] de Icaza [Ximian CTO, Novell VP and the driving force behind Mono]. He’s no Steve Ballmer, either. Rather, Messman strikes me as a holdover from a different Novell, a company that sold software only to men in suits, arrogant in the belief that nobody would ever dump its products for ones from an upstart such as Microsoft. I couldn’t help but ask myself: Was this really the man with the vision and drive to transform Novell from a networking-software vendor whose star has faded into one of the most prominent open source companies around?”
Mono is the Microsoft .Net work-a-like for Linux while Hula is an open source collaboration/groupware project to which Novell donated all of its Netmail code.
It’s interesting, but not surprising, that McAllister and I (and many of you) shared the same reaction to BrainShare (good vibes), the keynotes (drearily dull) and future (it’s hanging in the balance).
Novell needs a Steve Ballmer or a Chris Stone – someone with an important position in the company, someone who can walk the walk as well as talk the talk. And the “talk the talk” part is almost as important as the “walk the walk” part. An engaging, entertaining yet educating spokesperson – one who can energize the slackers, the hackers, the geeks, the nerds and the suits – is desperately needed in Waltham. I mentioned a couple of months ago that Carly Fiorina was available. She still is.
