Well!

If you’re a Novell fan such as I am, today has been a whirlwind of webcasts, e-mails, bulletin boards and more besides. Once I’d got over the shock of the Novell+Microsoft announcement (being as they’ve been at each other’s throats for years), I started to try and pick away at the outer shell and see what it was really all about from the inside.

You have already got the Slashdot demographic burning their copies of OpenSUSE and re-formatting their hard drives as we speak. That element will never go away, if anything, their views are not representative of IT users at large (large multinationals, big education etc.) and should be largely dismissed as myopic bigotry. The worst thing you can do at a time like this is go with your gut feeling and make a knee jerk reaction. I’ve been thinking about it all day, feeling negatively at first but then reason kicks in.

My initial reaction was how can you fuse two companies like this? Also, how can you fuse two companies that compete with each other in so many areas? Messaging, Servers, Desktops, Identity Management etc. The common complaint with Novell has always been great technology + bad marketing and company leadership. But for loyal techies, the company would have died out years ago. If the company ever needed the oxygen of publicity, this is certainly of Michael Jackson tent proportions!

Also, my first thought was that this was Novell+Microsoft lacing up the gloves to deal with Red Hat and Oracle. Novell don’t like Red Hat (#1 Linux company) and Microsoft don’t like Oracle (#1 Database company). Also, there are probably personal issues between Steve Ballmer and just about everyone ;-). However, if that were truly the case, the deal would not have been months in the making, as both parties would have you believe.

So then, is this deal eminently bad for Novell? Have they made their deal with Mephisto? It would appear so at first glance, but you have Open Source evangelists such as de Icaza, Friedman and Meeks throwing their weight behind it. One wonders what someone like Andreas Jaeger feels about it, he’s got as much to lose as most, but hasn’t publicly commented that I’ve seen. These aren’t stupid people, and they are also defenders of the OSS faith, if you like. You can be sure they’ve been over the paperwork like a rash before it was all signed, something Michael Meeks has alluded to already.

What should we read into this? Firstly, I’m not sure that much will change at all. It’s a good thing that Microsoft have finally broke down the barriers to working with Linux, they’ve realised that in the data centre first and foremost, it isn’t going to go away. My gut feeling too is that many people have spent the intervening years between XP and Vista to see just what desktop Linux has to offer, and seen the great strides that it has made (myself included).

If you have the technologists working together, it might mean a reduction in Microsoft bringing out patches that kill Novell products (but don’t bank on it just yet). Working in a large organisation, we try to procure best of breed at whatever we do, whether that be Microsoft, Solaris, Linux, NetWare or Mac. In point of fact, we have a healthy population of all of those platforms. Novell woke up to the fact years ago that customers don’t want a single vendor solution, they want to spread around the “love”. At the very least, not keeping your vendor eggs in one basket allows you to beat the other suppliers with that stick and play them off against each other.

IT customers are now smarter than they’ve ever been. They’ve got upgrade apathy and wonder just what’s in it for them. They don’t fall for the “faster, cheaper, better” arguments as much. They don’t fall over themselves to get sales people through the door. Budgets are generally smaller, expectations of the services gets ever higher and with that comes a sharper bargaining edge. Microsoft appear to have gone through this door, finally. Let customers run what suits them best, and don’t lecture them. There’s plenty of room for all, if we just tune our ethics slightly.

You have to remember that the software industry is relatively immature, and as such is still evolving at an exponential rate. Both Ballmer and Hovsepian were brazen about still competing with each other for business, but most customers have that mix of platforms I mentioned earlier, and it’s the vendors responsibility to open doors to each other to make it all work.

I have my doubts that Microsoft will bring that much to the table, but then deal is a day old. Let’s not over-react and give the partnership a chance. All I want is for Novell to still be around in 5 years time. If dovetailing with Microsoft is how they do this, then so be it. As long as the company continues it’s policy of mixed source and retains it’s independence, then maybe we’re all making more of this than there is.

Of course there is always a lot more to it than meets the eye, and I wouldn’t ever make a deal with Steve Ballmer, but each to their own. Michael Meeks is due to speak at our GUG event on the 22nd November, and it’s my guess he’ll be spending most of his time fielding questions about this very topic.

Let’s wait and see…

Congratulations to the European Ryder Cup golf team on beating the USA rather handsomely, yet again. A superb event, with thrills, skills and some supreme courage. No doubt Darren Clarke will get all the headlines tomorrow for playing (and playing well) just a few short weeks after losing his wife to cancer. Kudos too to the Americans. Taking defeat is difficult, but they were all supremely humble and were first to point out that the best team won over the three days. Sport is trivialised by many, and I have to say golf probably has more critics than most, but I’m sure Darren Clarke will say it’s been a cathartic last three days. Watching him close out his match and let the dam break on his emotions was tough to watch – the loss going through his mind, along with the joy of winning and not letting his team down and the relief that it was all over.

It’s a strange phenomenon indeed how sportsmen turn in their best performance on the back of massive personal tragedy. I wonder how this happens, perhaps they play because they have nothing to lose, that the game isn’t bigger then their tragedy or they simply want to vent their anger and frustration in a positive way. In any case, I’m still stuck with the picture of Clarke’s caddy and the tears in his eyes. Tiger Woods too, who apparently begged Clarke to play (Woods lost his father earlier this year) and gave him a lot of support. Like the Ashes last year, it was ferocious sport with both teams having massively talented players with a huge will to win, but at the end of it was mutual respect and the game played in a fantastic spirit. It’s watching on days like this that makes your heart feel glad and that whilst the concept of many sports is stupidly trivial, it matters a huge amount in people’s lives.

On a massively more trivial note, treated myself to a new widescreen 19″ widescreen monitor. Some small fiddling in YaST to get it going, but it looks good now and a bit of a shock to the eyes!

I had intended to write something on Monday, and in the end, totally ran out of time. It’s been five years since the terrorist attacks on September 11th. I remember that day so vividly, it was just so surreal yet horrifying. Surreal in that it looked like something from a far fetched Hollywood movie, not real life. I think only in the days and weeks after, and in reading the press reports of survivors tales and some witness reports of those who weren’t so lucky, that it really started to hit home.

I’ll always compare the events to the assassination of JFK. You remember exactly where you were when you heard the news. For me, 9/11 was my generation’s JFK. A moment in time when the innocence ended. A moment in time when the seriousness of adult life really smacks you in the face. The tough decisions people have to take. I remember being in Boots in Manchester looking for razor blades when I got the call. At that stage, I had no idea of what was to come the rest of the day. Our internet link at work melted as everyone wanted any scraps of information. Phones rang, people gathered round and chattered. Everything stopped while we looked on.

I’m struck by the story of the chef from the WTC rooftop restaurant who decided there was no way out and he wasn’t being burned alive. He took the decision to jump to his certain death. If you’ve ever seen photos from the top of the WTC towers, you’ll have some sense of the height of them and what thoughts must go through your mind before you take the decision to go over the side. Apparently his family took comfort from the fact that he took control of his own circumstances just before he died.

Bin Laden is a qualified engineer and apparently never budgeted for the towers coming down, it was just a bonus for him that they did. I also read that his sole intention was to suck the US and others into war against the Middle East and Islam which would never end and draw clear lines between one demographic and another. He won, if you look at it that way.

Since then, thousands of innocent men, women and children have died. Allied service men, Iraqi and Afghan nationals. I don’t condone for a second what the terrorists did, but you have to ask if George Bush is just as bad. He also goes under the banner of religion, Christianity being his badge of choice. Even Blair has attached himself to it, claiming “God will judge him” on whether the invasion of Iraq was right or wrong. Sometimes it can take the most courage to step back, take a deep breath, take a little time and do the right thing. Iraq was never the right thing, and you might argue that nothing has been gained in Afghanistan.

One of the best things to come out of the IRA attacks on the British mainland was the attitude that we all have to carry on, you can’t really protect yourself from a terrorist attack, they are too opportunistic. Generally speaking, we let them do their thing and when they see that we are outraged but we don’t get sucked in, we claim the moral high ground and some manner of victory.

There will always be wars and always be religion, if you are belligerent, it matters not which flag you fly.

Our project to develop Linux on the desktop at work has taken a big step forward. I now have a green light to put something together, with a view to having something tangible by Christmas. The list of requirements is fairly small and specific. I don’t think we’ll have too many problems hitting those marks, I expect the problems to come later when we try to do things we take for granted with Windows, such as Dynamic Local User etc. Nothing that’s a showstopper, but requires some lateral thinking.

I’m excited about it because it’s something so different. I’m bored with Windows, to be truthful. It seems like a technology space where nothing much is going on. In years gone by, I used to look forward to new versions of Windows, but I don’t give a toss about Vista, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I think the two biggest cockups from Microsoft’s perspective are taking 5 years to bring a new version out and also having six different versions of Vista. For God’s sake, why?

It’s going to be good for us to develop Linux as I think it’s really getting there on the desktop now. It’s also excellent publicity for us, and I just hope that the financial investment is there if and when we need it.

I just did, it hit my funny bone 😉

…to find a letter from NTL to tell me that my broadband is to be upgraded to 2MB free of charge by the end of October. Which was nice.

Tried and failed to install Windows 2000 Pro on a 5 year old PIII today. It took me three hours (possibly more) to come to the conclusion that I was wasting my time. Installed the OS, it boots. Hangs on startup. Works when you go into VGA mode. OK, must be graphics drivers I thought. Did that. same problem. Added SP4 – BSOD and INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. Decided to stop wasting my minutes and went for XP again instead. I’d love to ditch Windows altogether and put Linux on there, problem is we need to be able to play Windows games as it’s for Matt.

So happy August. Can’t believe it’s gone so quickly this year. The last couple of days I’ve not really stopped thinking about how quickly attitudes in the world are changing. Some of it is fashionable, sure, but a lot of it isn’t.

I’m certainly becoming more and more aware of doing business with ethical companies. One that certainly isn’t (though they may argue against me) is Microsoft. I notice that they are planning on introducing a personal music player for Christmas called Zune. That’s fine in itself, but they’ve already admitted that they’ll be selling it as a loss leader for some considerable time before that side of the business breaks even. This is even the business model for the XBox. Introduced in 2001, I read that it will be 2007 before it starts to return profits on the investment Redmond put into it.

That is clearly insane, but once you get over that point, it’s strangely paradoxical that the man who started it off, Bill Gates, has his company trample all over any kind of competition (See Apple in this space, Linux increasingly in the computer business, Sony in the games console space) by using their massive corporate cash reserves, whilst donating billions to the poor via his foundation. I truly admire the guy for the latter (surely by now he must have stockpiled everything he wants out of life and is bored and wants to give it away), but I find it hard to stomach that his company pulls on big boots and stamps on smaller businesses whenever they feel like it.

Their response? We’re innovating. Say what? Innovating isn’t rehashing old ideas, or taking five years to slowly evolve a bloated desktop OS, or re-heating Office every few months with one extra feature (which no-one uses) for another £500. Or even buying up industry leading technologies, such as Visio and Great Plains, for example. Innovating my arse. The XBox was largely born because Office and Windows market penetration had reached saturation point and the business needed to diversify to keep the stockholders happy. Now they’ve seen Apple make waves with the iPod/iTunes model, they want a bit of that because it’s something they don’t already do. I do fear that by now there aren’t many people left for them to win over. I resisted the iPod for a long time, but in the end I realised that it was simple, stylish and intuitive (all apart from iTunes, which I think is the worst bit of software ever from a usability perspective).

Using Linux for your computing needs is ethical, because it’s all shared knowledge and power. No one person gets a massive benefit over the other. If you can make an improvement to software, you benefit and then you pass it back for the benefit of others. Totally transparent, no hidden agendas, everybody wins. Built to open standards, and you make sure every man + dog can plug into it later on.

Aside from those people, I believe on maintaining relationships with business suppliers and partners up until the point that they let you down one too many times after you’ve told them. I’ve had a reseller on the phone lately making all kinds of obviously bogus statements about our current Novell partner and basically trying to muscle in on our account. Naturally I told her to get stuffed. If we’re not happy in the current arrangement, we tell them. If we don’t get anywhere, then we move. It’s not like buying gas and electricity!

The world is changing and people are starting to think twice about who they spend their money with and why. Hopefully this will stick, and some ethics will bleed through to the people who matter, such as Tony Blair, who seems to be living inside a bubble. I’ve never felt so badly about the state of British politics since…I can’t remember. With this much material, it’s a shame Spitting Image never made a comeback. Making jokes about it is all we have left.

So let’s see, what’s going on in the world at the moment.

Well, Israel and Lebanon are bombing the shit out of each other. Hmm, it seems that the UK is nominally on the side of the Israelis in this conflict, by virtue of the fact we seem to be a pile on America’s bottom. We just do what they say, whatever and whenever. It makes us all look rather stupid. Mr Blair, you must be so proud.

Condoleeza Rice goes to the Middle East, ostensibly to peddle peace, which seems a trifle two faced when the US are shipping armaments out to Israel like they’re going out of fashion. Maybe she’s over there to drop off the invoices personally, you know, just to make sure the Israelis realise they’re on 30 days credit or something.

I can’t imagine the folks living in these areas thinking war is the way forward, no matter how much you hate the opposition. Who wins in war? As far as I can see, it’s fertile ground for construction companies, armaments companies and religious head bangers who think it’s all a good idea to kill someone on the grounds that the opposition follow someone else’s God. Come on, like it’s a franchise!

Away from the arguments you can’t win, I’ve had a delve into Michel Thomas’s Spanish course. Interesting! It’s very popular and you can see why. He’s basically showing you how a lot of English words are roughly the same in Spanish (and presumably any other latin based language) and how quickly you can start constructing crude sentences. Hopefully I’ll get time to persevere with it in the coming weeks.

Bueno!

I think you tend to forget when you are cooped up in a shady, air conditioned office all day just how hot it is currently in Manchester. Today it’s 28C and it really does take your breath away when you walk out of the front door and it hits you.

That said, by this time a week on Friday, it’s nailed on to be freezing and blowing a gale, as that’s when the annual Beckett family trek takes us to Newquay with our tent. Don’t say you weren’t warned!

Cool things rediscovered #4 – Ten, by Pearl Jam!
😉