Novell interview

http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=8957

Most of the time in an interview, you have to sift through the marketing-speak to get to the meat.  Here, the guy lays everything out there.  Some interesting quotes:


About losing market share:
---
We’re not dropping NetWare. That’s always been the issue. You’ve got to be sensitive as to how you say it. NetWare is on a 13% decline per year and it’s been going that way for years. We don’t try to hide that. That’s the reality. So we have to do something about it. Adding features to it doesn’t improve that. It doesn’t stop that from happening. What we just did might. It’s early to tell. But that was the goal -- to try to stabilize that.
---


About moving the corporate HQ:
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Q: Your headquarters are in Waltham, Mass., now but we haven’t been writing about that.

A: We filed our 10K in February, and part of the requirement that the SEC had -- this is all part of the new governance rules -- is that wherever the majority of the executives are should be the corporate headquarters.

We didn’t make a big deal about it. We were proactive about it. We called the politicians and talked to them. We didn’t ask everyone to get in their car and drive to Boston the next morning. There are 2,000 people in Utah, and it’s going to stay that way. It’s just more of a formality.
---


You don't usually get interviews this candid, this raw.  I already like this guy, whoever he is.

pds
Thursday, March 11, 2004

I'll bet his true hope is to get hired by Novell and then stolen away by Microsoft.

good idea
Thursday, March 11, 2004

---"I think Linux has an enormous amount of opportunity to provide two alternative desktops, whether that desktop is a general business desktop or verticalized for health care or [another] marketplace."-----
He's getting the right idea here. An immense number of desktops are basically only running one corporate app, plus possibly internal email and the intranet.

Stephen Jones
Friday, March 12, 2004

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