Bye Bye Novell

I've been a CNE since 1991. My clients are all SMB's.

Novell currently does not offer a price competitive SMB package along the
lines of their Small Business Suite 6.x product. Simple upgrades to things
like GroupWise for existing Novell SMB customers are excessively expensive
(it almost costs more to upgrade GW now than it did to purchase the entire
SBS 6.x product in the first place). Even trying to find the correct price
for the product is a monumental struggle, as is finding a place to actually
sell you the darn stuff.

Novell also abandoned users of GW6 in regards to DST patches even though GW6
in some installations has only been running for about 3 years.

Novell used to be the "Gold Standard" when it came to performance and
reliability, but that now is far from the case. I'm lucky to see a Novell
SBS 6.0 or 6.5 SBS Server with GroupWise run for a month or two before it
abends. Service Packs are a joke, as they usually cause more problems than
they fix, and in many cases will not install properly in the first place.
You usually need to quickly grab and install a host of "Post SP fixes" to
get your Server back to a somewhat reliable state after a SP install.

And then people ask, "What happened to Novell?"

The answer is: Novell self destructed. They are their own worst enemy.
Always have been, Always will be.

I hate to tell you Novell, that Linux is not the answer. Yes Linux works,
and it's pretty, but without application support for the masses, it'll never
see any appreciable desktop penetration. Anyone who thinks otherwise is not
really playing with a full deck, so to speak.

Many would like to see Linux take hold in the desktop, but that will not
happen until the "Joe Sixpack" of the SMB market can run their applications
on it, and we're a long, long way from that happening.

So, Novell, it sure is obvious that you don't care about the SMB market, and
have abandoned it totally and completely, along with folks like me.

Novell is a company without direction , leadership, and purpose. It's sad
to see it come to this.

But that is OK. I really don't mind. I'm just stating the obvious anyway.

Bye Bye Novell.....:)

........fanboi's can flame away if you care to....:)