At Novell waking up with a naked homeless man in my bed

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10118571.post-45444971359602962192008-04-23T23:21:00.001-07:002008-04-24T00:02:10.532-07:00At Novell waking up with a naked homeless man in my bedor "Get the hell out of my sandbox" Pop Quiz - You must answer this question with a Yes or a No. No hedging, no waffling, no maybes. Ready? Here is your question - Is NetWare or OES2 a Collaboration product? Remember, your answer must be limited to Yes or No. Okay, what did you answer? If you are a normal person, and I asked several normal, well informed people before I posted this question, your answer is going to be No. OES2 or NetWare is, according to a very well informed person I know: "It's an operating system with associated services" or "Associated operating system and networking services" It is definitely not a Collaboration product the way the real world thinks of collaboration products. If this is the case, then why is Novell's CTO, in his recent blog about Novell's future roadmap, making statements like this: Opening line for the road map of Collaboration: "With OES 2 and GroupWise, Novell has a strong record in secure collaboration." You can read the full blog here: <a href=http://www.novell.com/ctoblog/?p=75>Novell CTO Blog</a> A Naked Homeless man in my bed Let me be blunt. I wasn't very popular when I was at Novell. Oh, there were a lot of people who liked me personally, but there were a whole lot of people who were p*ssed at me on a regular basis. I was in charge of Novell's Collaboration marketing strategy. That included GroupWise and NetMail. I was, for most of my time there, a one man show. For a brief time I had the most amazing partner, Deborah Martin. If she is still there, she is what keeps things moving at that company...but I digress. I was pretty much on my own running Novell Collaboration marketing. I was doing it on a shoestring budget and with almost ZERO resources from the rest of the company. I've already blogged about some of this, having to pull in outside people to even man the GroupWise booth at a tradeshow. A few days ago I blogged about NetWare, Novell's cash cow nearly killing the company. You can read that blog here: <a href=http://gwbliss.blogspot.com/2008/04/novells-cash-cow-how-netware-almost.html>NetWare Cash Cow</a> The NetWare team stomped all over everything because they were the biggest and the baddest and got what they wanted. Which means I was left with crumbs and anything else I could scrounge up. Then one day, the NetWare team realized they were in trouble. It was shortly after Chris Stone stating at the BrainShare keynote that maybe NetWare wasn't the future of Novell. Suddenly the NetWare team was scrambling. They had lost the confidence of upper management. They were in a free fall with their revenue. The product, version 6, had just launched and no one paid attention. During this scramble, GroupWise was doing quite well. Revenue was up, GroupWise had just had one of its best quarters in the history of the product. We were getting some good marketing going using partners and vendors. Things were looking up. It was at this moment that I had the most unusually event happen. Like the title of this blog, it was the experience of waking up in your own bed, only to find a homeless stranger laying next to you. I was sitting in a large meeting, minding my own business, when the NetWare team got up and began to present their new marketing message and product road map. Honestly, I wasn't paying attention to it much until I heard and saw on the Powerpoint. "As we represent the Collaboration Team here at Novell, we blah, blah, blah..." Did they just say they were the Collaboration team? Sure enough. The NetWare team, looking for a reason to exist, had decided to climb into my bed and make themselves at home. Homeless, penniless, and naked, they had looked at my snug little corner of the world and decided they were going to claim it for themselves. And you know what? THEY GOT AWAY WITH IT! I tried to explain to everyone that NetWare wasn't a Collaboration product. "Oh yes it is. You share stuff like file and print, that makes it a collaboration product" "People are collaborating" I was out gunned, out manned, and out maneuvered. The good news was though, that it really didn't change anything for me. I continued doing my thing, just being careful to never really say that I was actually doing anything that was collaboration. Today, it would appear from Jeff Jaffe's blog, the OES team is still trying to convince everyone that they are part of the collaboration market space. It is this kind of internal struggle that is going to continue to cause Novell problems as they try to compete in the collaboration space for real. Richard BlissRichard Blisshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06711443052326619281noreply@blogger.com