Novell: The Avis of Open Source?
Whenever The VAR Guy hears chatter about Novell, he thinks of Avis — the Number 2 rental car company that proudly declares “We try harder” as it pursues the market leader (Hertz, er, Red Hat). Hmmm. Is 2008 the year that all of Novell’s hard work in the open source market finally pushes the company into the fast lane? UBS, the Wall Street analyst firm seems to think so. But The VAR Guy isn’t so sure.
First, let’s start with the good news. UBS has upgraded Novell shares to a “buy” from a “neutral” rating, based on an analysis of three key factors (cash on hand, legacy software sales and Novell’s newer business units). Barron’s mentioned the upgrade today. And The VAR Guy has been quick to note that Novell is successfully pushing its desktop SuSE Linux business deeper into China.
Wonderful. But Red Hat still commands overwhelming mind share and growing market share in the open source sector. In fact, company officials have boldly stated that they expect Red Hat to command more than 50 percent of the server market by 2015.
Red Hat may regret such statements if upstarts like Canonical (promoter of Ubuntu Linux) gain momentum or if another disruptive technology comes along. But the market share prediction also reinforces that Red Hat has the upper hand against Novell.
Full disclosure: The VAR Guy owns a handful of Red Hat shares and a Linux PC running Ubuntu. He’s never owned Novell shares. And he hasn’t run a Novell operating system since Personal NetWare took over his 386 PC in 1994.
It’s not fair to call Novell the Avis of open source. I’m not sure Novell “tries harder” than Red Hat. But I do think suse linux performs better than red hat linux. and unlike your coverage, I do see value in the Novell-Microsoft relationship.
The Avis approach worked as an ad campaign, not as an actual business strategy. Case in point (from http://www.duhmagazine.com):
Republicans struggling to rebuild ‘damaged’ brand: After considering a revival of the original Avis ad campaign “We’re Number 2”, analysts pointed out that the slogan does not work well under a two party system.
I’ve never been a fan of SuSE and have been even more repulsed by the behavior of Novell. All my servers will continue to run Fedora, Debian, or Gentoo. If Novell wants my consideration they’ll have to try harder to be a good member of the community and not be in bed with the enemy.
RedHat/Fedora and Ubuntu suck golf balls through a garden hose!! So far SLES and openSuSE have my vote!!
[…] and speaking of Avis, Joe published the following article yesterday: Whenever The VAR Guy hears chatter about Novell, he thinks of Avis ” the Number 2 rental car […]
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