Whither Novell?

[joea at j4computers.com]

I was pondering a response to this thread, but  Bill has said just about everything
I would have said, and probably better.

joe a. 

>>> On 4/20/2009 at 4:24 PM, Bill Brush <bbrush at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 12:32 PM, jrd <jrd at netlab1.oucs.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>>      You are expressing opinions shared by many folks. Yet, I think there is
>> something amiss on the client/customer side these days which may help in
>> thinking through the situation.
>>      It revolves about that often stated situation, as you write, "If a
>> company
>> doesn't value my business, then why am I bothering to patronize them?" Can
>> we see the problem here? I don't think we are buying social visits from
>> vendor
>> reps, as nice as such visits may be. We aren't necessarily patronizing a
>> vendor
>> as if bestowing favors and honors; I thought it was all about goods vs
>> money.
>> Do we really care what a vendor thinks of us personally, provided they don't
>> tell others?
> 
> 
> I think in sales speak we're dealing with something that used to be a
> "delighter" having been moved to a "qualifier."  It used to be that
> people were delighted by a good sales relationship.  Now we've come to
> expect it for a company to qualify as a candidate.   I don't know
> about you, but if I go to a restaurant and get exceptionally poor
> service, it doesn't matter how good the food is, I'm not coming back.
> Likewise with Novell, if they make it painful to deal with them, it
> doesn't matter how good their products are, I'm not going to want to
> use them.
> 
> A good case in point is Novell's Tech Support.  It used to be the
> standard to which I held all other companies.  Now it's just an "also
> ran."  The off-shoring of the support team with the attendant loss of
> institutional memory, and culture has changed it from something I was
> happy to deal with to something I dread.
> 
> Not having a go at Joe on this one,  but Novell has long had an
> attitude of "our products are the best from a technical standpoint, so
> everyone should beat a path to our door" and it just isn't going to
> happen.  Being the best from a technical standpoint isn't enough to
> win in the marketplace and I'm perpetually amazed by Novell's cultural
> blindness to that fact.  The I.T. industry is littered with  the
> corpses of products that were superior technology, but lost out to
> other products that fit the market better.
> 
> Honestly I'm getting pretty tired of being the Novell champion and if
> I hadn't spent the last 10 years getting this network changed from a
> liability to an asset I would probably just say "Go ahead and move to
> M$ file servers, and enjoy the pain that will cause."  But the fact of
> the matter is, I have spent the last 10 years transforming this
> network and I have too much invested to just chuck it all.  I think I
> can convince the boss that moving to OES-L is the better course of
> action, but if I do I don't think it will be because Novell helped me
> with it, it will be because it'd be a lower labor cost option when
> compared to moving terabytes of data to an entirely different server
> OS.
> 
> Bill
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