Rob Enderle

RE: Windows 7 Deployment Best Practices

MigrationExpertZone — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:23:56 GMT

Excellent summary, Rob! However, I'm surprised by the interest in, and support of, deploying Windows 7 on older hardware. Surely there are more gains to be had from adding newer, faster hardware than trying to upgrade old systems just to string them along for another year or two?

RE: Novell for Sale: Another SCO Moment Coming?

User1780221 — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:04:04 GMT

I think a price tag has already been established for Linux. If you remember back in late 2003, Novell acquired SUSE and the price tag was approx. $300M. Since then I can't recall if any other Linux distro has been sold. I think Oracle thought about buying Mandriva but cloned Red Hat into Oracle "unbreakable" Linux. There are other open source projects though, besides Linux, for which substantial prices have been paid in recent years, including: MySQL sold for $1B to Sun (Oracle), Qumranet the KVM sponsor sold for $107M to Red Hat who also bought JBOSS for $350M, Zimbra sold to Yahoo! for $350M and has since been resold to Cisco? Xensource the commercial sponsor of the Xen hypervisor sold to Citrix for $500M.

And since Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the only other data center grade Linux distro out there besides, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I think there is no question about the value of a commercial Linux distro. Canonical's Ubuntu Server is clearly not in the same class with SLES and RHEL, especially in terms of support. Ubuntu may rule the Linux desktop market but I think that is another market entirely.

RE: Novell for Sale: Another SCO Moment Coming?

EricSarjeant — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 15:39:15 GMT

This might be better titled "Novell for Sale: What's Linux Worth?". There have been a number of Linux powered failures, but now there are only three major commercial players in the Linux market (Novell, Canonical and RedHat).

Granted, just about everybody else has a flavor of Linux available (IBM and Oracle inclusive) but the market is defined by these big-three.

If Novell is sold, this will put a pricetag on Linux. A bigger number here is better for both RedHat and Canonical. If Novell cannot be sold then that will be a strong indicator of what's to come for commercial Linux distribution and support.

RE: EMC vs. Google: There Should be No Competition

RobEnderle — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:21:37 GMT

Certainly you could argue that making money didn’t help Vista and even going back to MVS and VM if dominant, while products get cycled, the “improvements” you got weren’t really “improvements”. But as soon as you see the revenue stream at risk you move decisively. You may recall it took awhile for Microsoft to fund a response to either Google or Firefox. They still don’t have the level of funding behind ie that would exist were it a profit center. I think this free stuff really causes firms to lose focus on what is important in a product and may largely be a failed, or more accurately, a failing model.

RE: EMC vs. Google: There Should be No Competition

edgeuser — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:24:18 GMT

Well, cycling Office makes sense from a revenue point of view. They release a new version and end support for the old version. And they get a nice revenue stream from upgrades. Same with Windows.

I understand your logic. But even if IE was sold separately their improvement motivation and focus would be directly proportional to how well or bad the product was doing in market share. So, IE6 would probably have had the same issues even if it was sold separately.

RE: EMC vs. Google: There Should be No Competition

RobEnderle — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:01:53 GMT

Yes but had they made money from it, they likely would have refreshed and improved it so they could cycle the base. They have similar market share with Office and Windows but they cycle those, granted with Vista and ME, they didn't cycle well but that was a different problem.

RE: EMC vs. Google: There Should be No Competition

edgeuser — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:52:03 GMT

"..Microsoft and IE6. It was free and Microsoft didn’t put much focus on it."

IE6 came out in August 27, 2001. At the time, IE almost had a complete monopoly in the browser market. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet-explorer-usage-data.svg) So from their point of view, they couldn't justify spending huge sums of money on something that was perfect, based on market share.

I don't know what the deal is with Google Buzz. Even the name is wrong. Yahoo has a service called Yahoo Buzz (http://buzz.yahoo.com/) and it was launched in 2008. I'm not a lawyer, but I would think stealing service names from your competitor is a no no.

RE: Novell for Sale: Another SCO Moment Coming?

RobEnderle — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:02:02 GMT

I had $2B first but the story I was reading said $1B so I changed it in pre-edit. Thanks for the catch. I know the SCO stuff is in play, but I'm not holding my breath either. Generally I hear SCO and I look for a table to hide under these days.

I think the issue with Eric was he was a poor match as CEO, you are right he did better than others, but acted as more of a CTO refining some products. Novell needed a major change, more of a turn around specialist and Eric wasn't that. I actually had dinner with him after he first got the job and he clearly wasn't CEO material yet. Didn't have the breadth required to do this kind of job. My issue with Eric isn't that he is stupid, but that he seems to constantly be in the wrong job for his talents. There are a lot of CEOs like this unfortunately.

Agreed it wasn't in much worse shape but it wasn't in much better shape either.

Appreciate the post, what I'd heard on the Novell/Microsoft fallout was that Novell got cold feet for fear of anti-trust problems. Your story makes more sense to me actually as why would Novell care about anti-trust, that would be Microsoft's problem.

RE: Novell for Sale: Another SCO Moment Coming?

User1780221 — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:49:47 GMT

I think you made a couple of factual errors in your blog post. I believe Elliott Associates, which owns 8.5% of Novell's outstanding shares, is offering $2B not $1B for the company. BTW, Novell has cash and short term assets of almost $1B as reported in their most recent quarterly financial report. And the case of SCO v. Novell is not quite over. Even though SCO is in Chapter 11 and the bankruptcy attorney fired the litigious Daryl McBride, Novell faces a jury trial to determine which company owns the Unix and Unixware copyrights. In August 2007 a Federal District Court judge in Utah did rule in Novell's favor on copyright ownership, but in a last ditch appeal by SCO, a Federal Appeals Court granted them a jury trial in the matter of the copyright ownership. The jury trial began on March 8th, 2010 in Salt Lake City. So we might get a jury verdict before too long but I'm not holding my breath.

As a long time reseller partner of Novell and observer of the company going back to 1984, I've seen previous acquisition efforts fall prey to something...Jim Manzi of Lotus backed out at the 11th hour over representation on the BOD of the merged companies...Novell wanted an equal number of seats and Lotus did not. Of course there was the famously reported attempt by Bill Gates to buy Novell that alienated the late Ray Noorda from Gates when he felt that Gates had double-crossed him on the deal. Then there were always rumors that IBM would buy Novell. After all, at one time IBM was selling "blue box" NetWare.

So I would not bet that the most recent offer to acquire Novell will succeed either, especially since it is not a technology company courting Novell, but just a shareholder firm who want to profit by selling off the company's intellectual property and making off with Novell's $1B in cash and short term assets.

Also, I think you unfairly dismissed Dr. Eric Schmidt's tenure at Novell. When he got to Novell in 1997 it was a mess. Dr. Schmidt focused Novell on replacing IPX with TCP/IP in NetWare and ran with an employee project called ZENworks, which will celebrate its 13th anniversary this year. And Dr. Schmidt directed Novell engineering to make eDirectory (formerly called Novell Directory Services) multi-platform and not a NetWare-only directory service. Today eDirectory runs on NetWare, Linux, Windows, Solaris and AIX. Dr. Schmidt came to Novell from Sun Microsystems where he knew all about SunOS (Unix). I don't think when he left Novell in 2001 that he left the company in worse shape than when he got there. I think it was Jack Messman and Cambridge Technlology Partners that did much more damage to Novell.

RE: The Slow Death of the PC: Still Waiting for a Viable Challenger

edgeuser — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:39:31 GMT

Yes, very cool (roll out date is 6/17) How does one even start a service like that? I thought my tech ideas were crazy. Imagine going to a bunch of investors and explaining how you'll be streaming Crysis over the net to homes and playing them on a micro consoles. Going to game publishers and trying to convince them their games can run on consoles the size of a matchbox.

RE: The Slow Death of the PC: Still Waiting for a Viable Challenger

RobEnderle — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:10:44 GMT

Yes sorry, 1000 miles, forgot a zero. Should be able to go farther once those new Cisco central office routers are in. Actually the future development stuff he is keeping close to the vest. It is really fascinating though. The catch will be server loading. No really good models on graphics loading of servers yet, just what they got during the beta and for a service, beta isn't a great way to test full load and models are unreliable when something is as new as this is. Should be interesting to watch this roll out later this year. It is cool though huh?

RE: The Slow Death of the PC: Still Waiting for a Viable Challenger

edgeuser — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:22:01 GMT

I've been watching the OnLive demo on Youtube;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qv4-GEK9Yo

I'm still trying to figure out what the catch is. He touches upon things like buffering and lost packets, which was the first thing I thought about when I saw the service. According to the video, the physical limit is 1000 miles and 80ms of latency. He talks about giving the micro consoles away and such, but nothing in terms of future development. He's basically holding a full blown network computer in his hand. The kind that Ellison would have only dreamed of back in the 90's.

RE: The Slow Death of the PC: Still Waiting for a Viable Challenger

RobEnderle — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:27:08 GMT

Not allowed to talk about their plans yet but your imagination is clearly on the right track. Yes have seen this off-site, no question it can work. Question is whether it can scale, looks great on paper. We'll see how it handles large loads. It is really a fascinating model.

RE: The Slow Death of the PC: Still Waiting for a Viable Challenger

edgeuser — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:24:10 GMT

I think I forgot to put a lol at the end of my all caps paragraph above, lol.

The 100 mile hub is interesting. Ultimately, you could end up with OnLive server farms for each community where people just rent boxes and games and connect through a thin client. At that point who cares about changing gaming, you've changed computing. If the experience is good enough, just offload your Windows boxes and everything else up there. If I can play games off the network, I can pretty much do everything else. And yes that would be better.

Have you tried this service off-site? Do they have plans for hosting OS's etc?

RE: The Slow Death of the PC: Still Waiting for a Viable Challenger

RobEnderle — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:50:28 GMT

Beta has gone well, we'll see if it scales. It only works on low latency networks and within 100 miles of the hub. If this works it will change gaming forever. If you can get high performance apps to work in the cloud, why wouldn't it be better? You should see the demo.

RE: The Slow Death of the PC: Still Waiting for a Viable Challenger

edgeuser — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:23:50 GMT

OMG! THAT THING HAS TO BE STOPPED! I'm here trying to convince people cloud apps are bad, they got entire game consoles in the cloud. And you giving statements like "So they either embrace it or it's a go-out-of-business " is not helping. (lol)

Seriously, I don't think what they are trying to do is technologically possible. I'm sure a whole bunch of people smarter than I have already figured it out, but I don't see it. Have you ever tried to play an online video with zero buffering? The reason you need buffering is for when you have late or missing packets, you need a 'buffer' zone to make up for it. With OnLive, you have 0 buffer, everything has to be streamed as soon as possible. So you're going to see every late and missing packet. And I have no idea how they've solved the hardware issue. If a standard PS3 can serve 2 players at the same time (I don't know how), they're going to need n/2 PS3's for their subscriber base. That's a lot of hardware. If they do pull it off, can you put in a good word for me during IPO time.

RE: The Slow Death of the PC: Still Waiting for a Viable Challenger

RobEnderle — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:49:30 GMT

Try www.onlive.com this is full gaming performance (Crysis level) hosted. Service assigns the performance you need based on the game. Flat rate. Launches in a few months. Steve Pearlman is CEO. Seen the demos and beta has gone well. Does require a good DSL or cable connection (latency more than bandwidth). But if he can do this and scale it... Secondary game revenue through demos (you can basically demo anything full resolution). Uses either a PC browser, or a very thin client. Cool huh?

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/OnLive-Promises-Hard-Core-Gaming-Minus-the-Hardware-66605.html

RE: The Slow Death of the PC: Still Waiting for a Viable Challenger

edgeuser — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:26:29 GMT

What is OnNow? Links please (yes, I've Googled it, even Binged it, nothing)

They are not going to be able to push hardware intensive apps to the cloud. I don't see how they can ration out a 3Ghz processor and 3GB of memory to a million customers at the same time, unless there is some kind of technology I am unaware of.

RE: The Slow Death of the PC: Still Waiting for a Viable Challenger

RobEnderle — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:42:02 GMT

Good point, if OnNow works (and we should know in about 3 months) that may not matter because that will showcase that performance can be pushed the the cloud as well. Many think it won't work so this is a "wait and see" thing.

RE: The Slow Death of the PC: Still Waiting for a Viable Challenger

edgeuser — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:13:39 GMT

Cloud computing started out as a benign concept and it's beginning to turn into a very dangerous one.

The PC hardware revolution of the past several decades was based on consumer needs for faster and cheaper computers to power their local applications. Now as applications are moving to the cloud, consumers are no longer looking for better and faster hardware. When (if) the next killer app that requires advanced hardware comes along, consumers wont have the hardware to make it work.