A Novell approach to business

Stop for a second and think about the IT industry. Think about it, name me another industry that can produce companies which rise out of nowhere to take on the world, sink into obscurity for about a decade, rise again to become the shining star of the industry, and complete the circle by alienating itself from the developers of its core technologies. This is the industry that breeds companies like Novell.

If you look back throughout Novell's history, how would you describe its progress? How does a tale of missed opportunities sound?

Novell was never really a competitive threat to Microsoft. It helped carved out a booming industry in commodity server operating systems for company LANs and the infrastructure software to support users of those servers. And in true Microsoft style, once it got a sniff of a multi-billion dollar software market, it went after it ferociously. The most visible effect being large-scale migrations from NetWare to Windows NT and the resulting forklift upgrade path users took to Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 today. This aggressive assault by Microsoft on the server market -- including the higher-level software like databases and CRM systems, which Novell ignored -- left Novell wanting.

By its own reluctant admission, NetWare had passed its use-by date. In the meantime, Linux had emerged from the shadows as the only viable mainstream competitor to Windows server. So with plans underway to migrate the NetWare kernel to Linux, Novell then went the whole hog and bought German software company SUSE Linux for a ridiculous amount of money in 2003.

What made that acquisition particularly significant was it immediately signaled Novell's intentions to do what few others have done in the history of computing -- go after Microsoft's desktop turf. Love it or loathe it, Microsoft's desktop monopoly (no it does not have a server or mobile monopoly - yet) was the result of two forces -- Microsoft's relentless drive towards a better user experience on the desktop and the inaction of the other IT vendors to compete in the same space. Some like to blame Microsoft's monopoly on IBM when in fact it was all the big names -- IBM, Oracle, Apple, Novell, HP, and Sun -- that failed to draw the market towards any viable alternative. The exception being Apple which waited until the turn of the century to re-engineer its operating system and leverage a truck-load of open source software so it could focus on delivering a better user experience. Voila!

It's this concept of leveraging open source software that has Microsoft cornered. Microsoft knows damn well it can compete with, and even raid if it so desires, vanilla open source projects which are seldom customer-focused marketing machines. What it will struggle to compete with is software companies taking the ocean of open source software available to everyone and massaging it into a user-friendly, commercially-supported and well marketed product.

While it's difficult to know exactly how much effort this involves (it will vary between organisations), doing integration and customisation work on top of free software is an order of magnitude less that what it would cost a company like Microsoft to engineer an operating system, and associated applications, from the bare metal up. That "last mile" on the road to better software may be all of 5 percent compared with paving it yourself from start to finish.

If Novell is one of a handful of software companies that understands the power of leveraging open source code -- Apple and Red Hat are others -- it certainly didn't waste any time proving to the world what is possible in this new age of software development.

Let's review the first principal outcome. Within three years of the SUSE acquisition, Novell issued three releases of its desktop operating system, culminating with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10 and its sibling SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). There were point releases of SUSE 9, and a flirt with the "Novell Linux Desktop", but the company's marketers came to their senses and decided against killing the strong SUSE brand.

Specific pros and cons aside, in essence, Novell had delivered a business desktop operating system on par with Windows Vista after only three years of adopting the massive open source code base in SUSE Linux. And one of the more encouraging things about SLED 10 is it was essentially a first-generation product. Overnight Novell had become a global provider of a desktop operating system with the potential to rival anything from Microsoft or Apple but with the distinct advantage of a free, unsupported version that can be installed on almost any PC -- OpenSUSE.

Furthermore, Novell's crack squad of source developers can, and will, release successive versions of their operating systems faster than a Microsoft or Apple. It took the world's largest software company five, yes five, years to release the successor to the now ubiquitous Windows XP. Will enterprises put up with that kind of laggard release schedule for yet another generation of Windows? The Department of Defence is still rolling out Windows XP. When is it going to upgrade to Vista, 2013?

That's the exciting thing about SLED 10, it was just the beginning and one can only imagine what the second and third generations will be like. Think an operating system with usability on par with Mac OS X available to everyone, with an annual or two-year release schedule.

The only thing left for Novell was to market the hell out of its new desktop and server duo, and as it turns out that's exactly what it did. In addition to an extensive advertising campaign, the company that seemed to be as boring as a preacher's sermon suddenly became the talk of the tech media. A corporate PR campaign any software vendor could only dream of fell into Novell's lap. Journalists who hadn't so much as heard of Novell were writing about, and reviewing, its new user-friendly desktop operating system.

You'd be forgiven for thinking a company on a roll like that would be solely focused on fortifying its marketing momentum and gaining more market penetration amid a lot of indecision surrounding the tardy Windows Vista. But Novell didn't see it that way.

All but six months into what can only be described as a global marketing resurrection on the back of SUSE 10, Novell went ahead and committed PR suicide by signing an "intellectual property" agreement with Microsoft. Why is it every time a company that poses any significant threat to Microsoft on the desktop goes ahead and signs an "IP" deal? The minute the deal was announced it bore an uncanny resemblance to the 2004 Microsoft-Sun alliance when the then struggling Sun had released a Linux desktop product but instead of aggressively pursuing that market decided to pocket $2 billion from Microsoft and go back to building servers. Sun's desktop operating system hasn't been seen since.

The Microsoft-Novell pact instantaneously alienated much of the open source community. Here was a company that had benefited tremendously from open source software but still decided it was in its right to go ahead and "shield" its own Linux product from any possible Microsoft patent litigation while knowing full well the exact same software was being used by every other Linux distribution and a host of commercial vendors. What Novell did may have been a "legal" workaround of the free software licences but from a technology standpoint it was completely untenable.

The free software world was up in arms. In typical open source, knee-jerk fashion, the community began to label Novell as a pariah and a traitor. Web sites sprung up calling for Novell boycotts, developers ran and cried to Google (Note to all those who think Google manages people's information more transparently than Microsoft or Novell: go and take a very cold shower), and the CIOs and IT managers who ultimately decide what software to use in their businesses have had FUD blasted at them ever since. All exactly what Microsoft would have wanted to see happen to a viable competitor!

Now, the Free Software Foundation has moved to be certain software licensed under its GPL version 3 can be immune to such third-party contractual nonsense, rendering the pact obsolete, but only time will tell if the individual open source projects adopt the update with fervour.

Will this spell the end of Novell as a mainstream platform vendor? It has definitely dented its uprising, but I doubt the consequences will be fatal. At least I sure hope not. Novell is still a huge contributor to open source, it knows it made a mistake (Ballmer's "undisclosed balance sheet liability" rubbish did shock Hovsepian), and successive releases of its software will be market leading.

For the first time Novell has an opportunity to stand up and make a real difference. The operating system space is in desperate need of competition. So stand up and make it happen Novell, don't waste time brokering meaningless intellectual property deals or peddling a legacy platform. And don't let the downward slide of history repeat itself.