Richard Bliss Blog

Novell Makes Smart Move and Cancels BrainShare 09

I've blogged about Novell's decision to cancel BrainShare and the role GWAVACon will fill.

You can view it at my new blog site:


Novell Cancels BrainShare

Free is not good. GroupWise's ongoing dilemna

Years ago Novell established the precedent that add-ons and additional functionality with Novell GroupWise would be free. The clamor for out-of-the-box solutions that come free has been heard at every BrainShare for a decade.

The problem with free is that it hurts the enduser, the very person who screams for free products or product integration is the one who ends up hurt in the end.

Free is bad.

Today Nokia announced the discontinuance of the Intellisync division. The solution that Novell had decided on for their GroupWise Mobile Server.

Nokia Announcement

You are building your business, your organization, your reputation, on the solutions that you, as an IT Manager or consultant, recommend. Do you really want to stake your reputation and relationship with your customer, your boss, or your end-users on a piece of "free" software?

Now, I don' have the room or time to argue the whole Open-Source issue about free vs proprietary. That is not what this conversation is about. I'm here to argue that if you want some thing of high value then you will have to pay for it.

Novell customers have demanded that they get device syncronization for "free". Well, Novell obligded and provide the opportunity to have a syncronization experience out of the box.

They got a free solution but now they are faced with a non-solution because Nokia couldn't find any way of making money with the Intellisync product.

If you want something bad enough, then pay for it. Nokia pulled the plug on Intellisync today which has placed all of Novell's GroupWise Mobile Server users in a tight spot. Their free server doesn't seem to have a future.

I've never been a fan of Novell offering everything for free even though it supposibly causes them to lose business.

An ActiveSync process will make more sense for Novell in the future.

Fear holds us back

Why do smart people do dumb things? Especially when it comes to marketing. Haven't you seen a company that goes along doing really smart stuff suddenly seem like they got a major case of the stupids?

What causes individual people to not do the right thing when the time comes?

Fear holds us back. Fear prevents us from stepping out and doing the right thing.

When Bill Gates famously turned his company around and moved it full steam into the Internet age, he was able to do this because he didn't care and wasn't afraid of what other people would say. Those people included his staff, his employees, his partners, his stockholders, and most importantly, his customers.

He did the right thing and didn't let fear hold him back.

Novell found itself paralyzed with fear for years. The people there had grown fat and happy with the way things were. NetWare was generating nearly $1 Billion in annual revenue and things looked sweet.

Except the bottom of the boat had been ripped out and the ship was sinking. But no one seemed willing to stand up and do something. Fear paralyzed the company. Those making the decisions would say that it wasn't fear, that they were trying to save it. Yes, they may have been attempting to save it, but they were afraid to stand up and say "NetWare is Dead" and then work from that premise. Instead they kept rearranging the chairs on the deck while the ship sank.

I remember when Chris Stone stood up at BrainShare and said that maybe the future of Novell wasn't NetWare. What a commotion it created. Everyone was in a panic. Even when it was plainly stated, those inside the company continued to tell themselves that Chris wasn't serious. He was just talking. No, he was serious, and wasn't afraid to say it.

When Ron Hovsepian made the decision to embrace a partnership with Microsoft, he made a lot of enemies. But he wasn't afraid to make a very hard choice that was good for his company and good for his customers. He still has the enemies but he also has success which makes dealing with your enemies a little easier.

Good people and good companies make bad decisions when they are afraid to rock the boat. When internal Chicken Littles actual prevent action because they are crying about the sky falling in. Seldom does the sky actually fall when strong bold decisions are made. It is the lack of a decision, the inability to get past those that wring their hands and prophesy doom, that leads to disaster.

If you want to be successful, have the courage to make the tough decisions. You will make enemies but success makes it a little easier to deal with them.

Does GroupWise have a future with Novell?

For a year and a half, the Novell GroupWise revenue stream has gone one direction...up! For the past six quarters, GroupWise has continued to defy expectations and has steadily increased their revenue.

There are a lot of pieces to the success, and it is amazing since Bonsai, the next generation of GroupWise has been delayed.

Novell is also growing. It's Linux business jumped 30%. Now, you find people suddenly saying nice things about Novell and its future. Over at the VarGuy, he isn't even shy about admitting that he hasn't been a Novell fan in the past but might be changing his tune.

With Novell's success, the question is asked. Does GroupWise have a future at Novell?

The future of collaboration is no longer focused on Microsoft. Collaboration innovation of the future is being deployed to Linux. Novell has a strong presence in the enterprise space, and especially with those companies looking to drastically reduce their costs and realize the gains from deploying Linux. The market leader in collaboration is all about vendor lock-in and spiraling costs of deployment and maintenance.

Companies are looking for Linux to help drive down costs and then they are looking for applications to run on Linux to continue to drive down costs. Collaboration, namely the email application is the primary target for major cost savings.

If Novell can focus GroupWise on this emerging opportunity then GroupWise has a chance to relaunch itself as the collaboration product of the new linux platform.

The answer is Yes, GroupWise has a strong future with Novell. GroupWise is good for Novell and Novell is good for GroupWise. The future looks brighter for the both of them.

Happy 20th Birthday, GroupWise

My brother called me to remind me that it was GroupWise's birthday. He is the one who talked me into doing email. Said it was going to be big, this was in 1989. He was right. I want to thank him for reminding me of the date and for putting me on the path that has sustained me the past 20 years.

20 years ago on 8/8/88 WordPerfect shipped their very first version of email. It was called WordPerfect Office 2.0 for DOS.

This Friday, 8/8/08 marks the 20th anniversary of Novell GroupWise, formerly known as WordPerfect Office.

The product was called WordPerfect 2.0 because it was a bundle of applications that were originally called WordPerfect Library. When WP Library 2.0 came out they added email, splitting the product into a Library version and an Office version.

WP Office product then expanded to other platforms, including WP Office for the Data General in 1989, then WP Office for Unix.

The original version only worked with a single post office. You couldn't send email to other organizations.

I remember the first email I ever received. I had just joined WordPerfect in May of 1989. I was sent an email from a friend, didn't understand what it was, so I deleted it. My mind couldn't grasp that someone had sent me a message, just to me, and that it had just showed up on my computer without me doing anything.

My friend came over to my desk and wanted to know why I had deleted his email. Even back then, the ability to track status was built in. He had sent me an invitation to his party and I had simply deleted the message. (Sorry Todd)

In Version 3, communication was possible between multiple post offices.

I worked at WordPerfect as a technical support operator. A few individuals were there who helped train me, including Brandon Black, CTO for Messaging Architects, and Trevor Harrison, owner and sysops for NGWList.

With the introduction of Post Office to Post Office communication, it became imperative to teach all of us how message flow worked, so we could troubleshoot a problem over the phone. In those days it was almost always rights issues in the wpcsin and wpcsout directories.

I developed a training course to help new GroupWise support technicians learn how to troubleshoot message flow. The course was called Squirrel 101 and every GroupWise/WP Office Tech support person had to sit through the course.

It pretended that a small squirrel was running around inside the GroupWise system dropping off and picking up files to be delivered. I believe Sean Neumann is still teaching it, or a variation of it.

I know that the certification test that many of helped write contained aspects of the concept. Squirrle 101 lives on, nearly 20 years later and taught many a GroupWise person how to figure out just where the message was and where it wanted to go.

In 1994, Novell purchased WordPerfect, then sold off most of the company but kept WP Office and renamed it to GroupWise, not before it was named Symmetry for about 3 months. But a company in the UK had the name already and threatened to take legal action, so the name was chosen as GroupWise.

Again, thanks to my brother Rodney Bliss who reminded me of the date, and for being a part of the success of GroupWise.

GroupWise has helped me pay my mortgage for nearly 20 years. Happy Birthday GroupWise, and may we see you live for another 20 years.

GroupWise and the iPhone - Coming next week

August 11th, Notify Technologies has announced they will be shipping their connector for GroupWise and the iPhone.

I think it is a smart move on Novell's part to work with a vendor like Notify to deliver the connectivity to the iPhone rather than attempting to to do it themselves.

Yes, most GroupWise customers would prefer that it was free, similar to the GMS model, but in reality, it is best that customers pay for this to a company that is focused on doing nothing but making it work as well as possible.

Novell GroupWise is extremely inexpensive to run. I don't mind paying the small amount extra to get good support for my connection issues.

The iPhone is a business tool and will continue to grow. If GMS isn't going to support it, and BES certainly isn't going to support it, then Notify Technologies solution becomes the only answer.

Unfortunately short-sighted individuals will demand that their organizations abandon GroupWise because they can get support for the iPhone for free with Exchange.

This is lunacy. To incur millions of dollars in additional costs simply to not have to pay a small amount of money for a few individuals within an organization that needs iPhone connectivity.

In today's economy and uncertain economic future, I want to have the kind of budget that can make such fiscally irresponsible choices.

Vista winning the Enterprise - I don't think so

Joshua Greenbaum with ZDNet recently wrote an article discussing how Vista will win in the Enterprise but will do it the ugly way.

I'm going to disagree here. If Vista is winning, it is doing it with a pyrrhic victory.

Definition of Pyrrhic: a victory with devastating cost to the victor

Vista has forced all of us, or the 97% of the computer world that runs Windows, to reconsider our decision. For the first time, a true competitor to Vista, Microsoft's latest desktop OS has emerged, and it is XP. Microsoft is attempting to sell all of us something we don't want, at a price we can't afford, to do things that have no value to us.

And it has caused all of us to pause and reconsider. And that is where Vista has lost. For the first time the market is looking around and asking if there is anything easier than Vista? And since we can't have XP, then what are our alternatives.

Some will turn to Linux, with the allure of lower cost and freedom from proprietary tyranny. Others, like myself, will embrace Mac completely, putting up with the problems of making the adjustment because I'm already aware the problems with going to Vista are even bigger.

Some businesses will embrace the Microsoft path of madness. But many others will begin the imperceptible process of slowing down our decision to purchase more Microsoft. The economy will help mask the truth that people aren't willing to send their shrinking IT budgets to Redmond.

This is an opportunity for Red Hat, Ubuntu, Novell, and Apple, and IBM with their Mainframes.

Microsoft has given every single person on the planet a reason to stop and reconsider, and this time there is a wide range of choices.

Vista has lost the Enterprise, not won it.

Kablink

If you haven't heard, The Open Source Project formerly known as ICEcore has announced that they are renaming ICEcore to Kablink.

You can read it here

From a marketing perspective I completely disagree with this decision. Changing names is an important step if you have a specific reason.

Gartner Group changed their name to just Gartner. That is a good move since the word Group causes a sense of smallness to enter into the customer's mind when it is used in the name.

But if you are going to change your name, don't pick something worse.

I typed in Kablink into Google to see what came up on top.

This is what came up as the first link:


First Impressions

When you say the word Kablink outloud it changes the way you perceive the word. Written, it isn't so bad, but when spoken, the mind races to finish the word before you finish speaking it...

"Ka...." in my case is filled in with "Kaput", to be finished, done, over.

Or, if you hear the Blink stronger than the Ka, then it becomes "On the blink", "First one to blink", "blink and you miss it"

Owning a word

I'm not sure what the purpose was here and it is probably not going to make much difference in the long run, but if you are going to do something as drastic as change your name, in the future, focus on capturing something stronger that will help you, not hurt you.

iPhone and GroupWise

Notify Technologies, a great Novell GroupWise Partner, announced last week that they will be supporting the iPhone for Novell GroupWise.

You can read the press release here

This kind of support from Notify for GroupWise will help. As disclosure, I'm a Notify Technology user, and will be using them to sync my new iPhone. I currently use Notify to Sync my BlackBerry to GroupWise.

I have read criticism on some of the forums chastising Novell for having a 3rd party involved and not providing the integration themselves and that it should be engineered into the product.

The critics are flat out wrong.

Having a solution that comes from a 3rd party has its good points and bad points, but overall, you always want development done by those closest to the customer and closest to the money.

If Novell were to bring iPhone development inhouse and own the process, they would be forced to own it forever. This means that future resources are now tied to supporting this feature, even if the feature loses importance.

Also, by moving the development inhouse instead of relying on a good 3rd party partner, you move the development team away from their core strengths. Novell isn't a mobility company. They aren't focused on mobility issues, but Notify Technologies is (and Toffa, which will also provide support.)

Paying for 3rd party

It is ironic that end users complain about having to pay a 3rd party to get support for a solution like the iPhone. Everything has a cost, and even if Novell developed the integration themselves, somewhere, somehow, end users would still have to pay.

GroupWise is one of the least expensive collaboration applications to run, which means that a GroupWise shop has more money to spend on those upgrades and features that their organization needs and uses rather than buying a bunch of overhead that they can't or won't use.

Document management is the perfect example. Novell GroupWise comes burden with a document management system that used to be the #1 DMS in the industry. But as soon as they started giving it away for free it became difficult for Novell to continue to afford to pay for it. They removed themselves from being close to the DMS customer and removed themselves from the DMS revenue.

Now the rest of us are paying for a decision made a decade ago. There are many who use DMS, but there are more who don't.

I happy to see Notify and Toffa stepping up quickly and look forward to having my new iPhone work with GroupWise, especially since it will be going through a 3rd party vendor that I trust to get it right.

Don't listen to your customers

In marketing, an aspect that is often overlooked, is the impact that time has on a company's image and brand. I'm not talking about a little bit of time like 18 months or 3 years. Instead, I'm referring to time like multiple decades, when 20 to 30 years go by. There is a change that occurs to your brand over that amount of time. Change that often doesn't have anything to do with a marketing departments efforts to change the image but instead the image changes itself.

For years, Novell has had an image problem. This image problem, basically that the company was lost, without direction and headed downhill, permeated the entire hi-tech industry. Everyone was on board.

In 2000, Joyce Graff, Senior VP at Gartner Group, wrote a paper stating that customers should get off of Novell GroupWise. Not because the product was bad, but because she felt the company didn't have a future.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Novell was dominant. But Microsoft made a successful stab the market and took the Network business away from Novell.

This caused the entire industry to have a certain opinion about Novell.

They used to be #1 but now they are washed up. That attitude carried over into everything they did. And every percentage point of market loss, every misstep or blunder, simply compounded the image of a company on its way down.

People at the time formed their opinion about who Novell was and what kind of future Novell had. Once things got bad, there wasn't much Novell could do to change that perception.

But then a funny thing happened. Time. Lots of time. It has been almost 15 years since Novell purchased WordPerfect and acquired GroupWise, then known as WordPerfect Office.

NetWare, once the dominant product in networking, isn't even talked about anymore. The people who remember, are fewer and fewer and the contrast between what Novell used to be and who Novell is today has grown dim with the passage of time.

Today, Novell customers are often young. They are part of the growing Linux community. Their memories don't stretch back 15 years ago to when they were still in high school. They only know Novell today, as the company is today, and don't have opinions formed from a previous lifetime.

Don't Listen to your customers

This long amount of time is important to determine the impact on your customer base. Those customers that have been with you for the decades are not the customers you want to listen to. They are the ones who remember the glory years and want you to go back, but they aren't going to generate the new ideas and new revenue to keep your company going. Novell is especially discovering this.

Instead, make tough choices, turn your back on the established customers, and move forward toward those customers that see you as something new. Who don't remember the past but get excited about your future.