Gordon responded to LO8125 (a post I made about merging two companies
together, in which I related some of our experiences as Novell and
WordPerfect)--
> I have exposure to Novell -- but not as a client so I am not revealing
> privileged information -- and it is renown in the technology markets as
> having no capacity to plan in any strategic sense (the ninety day
> forecast is the strategic plan as far as Ray Noorda was concerned) it
> has ferocious intercine warfare that fritters away opportunity, it had a
> history of acquiring assets and then mucking up the fruits of the
> acquisition (such as DR-DOS), and most of its operating
> groups/managers cannot operate, yet it has an enormous corporate
> ego -- hardy an ideal candidate to be the acquirer of a Camelot firm
> such as WordPerfect, which itself had been living on borrowed time.
> That acquisition was a waiting train wreck.
This is a very biased message, and I'll let Rick determine if it is
appropriate for the list, as I am unabashedly promoting Novell products!
I'd love to respond to Gordon's specific comments, but I've said enough on
the subject, and I certainly don't want to give away valuable information
that would benefit competitors.
Let me just say that whatever Novell's weaknesses have been (or continue
to be), there is a tremendous amount of commitment to the company and its
success from the employees. Personally, I'd bleed out of the eyes to help
Novell dominate every market it chooses to compete in.
BTW -- from where I'm sitting, Novell seems to have bought WordPerfect for
GroupWise -- not the applications. Novell _has_ done _wonderful_ things
with GroupWise, and our next version, GroupWise 5, is a fantastic product
that elegantly integrates messaging (including threading, shared folders,
etc.), document management and workflow. These three features make it an
excellent business tool: workflow allows business processes that don't
provide competitive advantage to be automated and simplified, giving users
the freedom, time, and resources to use the messaging functionality to
create new knowledge and exploit its competitive advantages.
[Host's Note: re-reading Ben's quote of the msg above, I wish I had not
distributed it. I do want real cases and active debate here on the list,
this is our best opportunity for real learning. But, I look for msgs that
go deeper than "XYZ co. is doing a great job" or "...not." If I had been
paying more attention, I would have gone back to Gordon to say, "OK,
you have these impressions of Novell... What do you think is going on
here? Why and how is this happening? And, what data has led you to these
conclusions?" If this thread is to continue, I'd like to do it on that
basis; we're not here to render judgement on whether any one company is
performing well. Ben, thanks for sharing your original msg about bringing
two entities together at Novell. ...Rick]
--Benjamin B. Compton ("Ben") | email: bcompton@novell.com Novell GroupWare Technical Engineer | fax: (801) 222-6991
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>