Why IDC-Novell survey is a dud

“Novell had a terrible quarter – here’s a quote from the
company’s chief financial officer, Dana Russell: “As we have stated
before, our Linux business is dependent on large deals, which may
result in some fluctuations of our quarterly invoicing. This
quarter, we did not sign any large deals, many of which have been
historically fulfilled by Microsoft certificates. Today, we have
invoiced $199 million, or 83 percent, of our original $240 million
agreement.” (emphasis mine)

“(It must be borne in mind that Microsoft made an additional
$100 million investment in Novell in August, something which
indicated to me that all was not well at Novell. Several American
IT pundits, however, saw it differently. It looks like they were
wrong.)

“Indeed, the very fact that Novell had to commission a survey
shows what dire straits it must be in. Over the years I’ve been
writing about free and open source software, I’ve seen numerous
surveys from the proprietary software crowd – which always tend to
paint a positive picture of proprietary software.”

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