AlwaysOn: Novell’s New Identity

“AlwaysOn: People are saying that Novell has
been kind of bumping along, and that maybe Novell should do
something very radical and scrap your whole kernel and build it
onto Linux, and basically join the Linux revolution. How would you
respond to that?

“Stone: We’re trying to get over those bumps.
First of all, Novell historically has always equaled NetWare, and
that’s fundamentally our strength and our weakness. Novell has
always been recognized as having invented networking. Novell was
the company that got people to communicate. The problem is that
there is a perception that NetWare is legacy. It’s perceived as an
old environment, thus; your ‘bumping along’ comment is that we’re
living off the installed base. We’ll argue that living off the
installed base isn’t such a bad idea, given the economic
conditions. People would like to be in high-margin software
businesses like we are; but we aren’t sitting in lounge chairs
drinking Pina Coladas all day long either. So we are changing our
model.

“Now strategically, about Linux, there’s obviously an
opportunity for us, for a company like Novell to be involved in
that community. But you’ve got to do it right, you only have one
shot at it…”

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