All the more reason . .
. . to emphasize marketing. If your product is invisible, even to those using it, you've got a marketing problem, not a product problem.
I can't recall seeing any Novell marketing in the last year or two, and that's bad because I'm far more aware of such things than most. They used to send me tons of crap, but all too technical to show to customers, and all aimed at businesses so large as to be irrelevent to my clients.
They pitched entirely to their resellers, but did absolutely nothing to prepare the field for those resellers to make the product easy to sell. Microsoft made selling their products effortless.
They need to find out who IBM is using and get down on their knees and beg them to take the account. The "Peace, Love and Linux" program got a lot of mileage (though part of that was because some dingbat used spray paint instead of chalk).
The "Blue Spacesuit" campaign, on the other hand, is pure genius. You can tell how good it is by how many tech columnists have written it up as stupid and pointless. It has total recognition. Even the little 1"x3" ones they run now. You're leafing through a magazine, your eye catches a patch of blue spaceman and your mind says "IBM". Over and over again.
Of course advertising is just one aspect of marketing, there are many more, and Novell isn't doing any of it. They've lost me completely - for Y2K all my former Novell customers got a nice new hard disk in their server with a Samba share named SYS.
Pick up at closing, deliver back at opening, a half hour to switch clients on the PCs and they're running at a fraction of the cost of a NetWare upgrade - and nobody protested because nobody cares a hoot about Novell any more. I remember when they wouldn't even consider anything else. That's a major failure of marketing.
Further, Novell wanted everyone to upgrade to v5 (desgned for large multisite businesses) including a tricky migration from bindary to Directory Services (with or without bidary emulation) and a new computer to support a much fatter product.
Yes, they had a Y2K upgrade for v3.x, but guess what? It runs out of OS/2 namespace (used by Windows long filenames) no matter how much memory is in the computer. I had to write a procedure for one company so they could hand start their server by hand enter the params to register additional memory because the product couldn't register memory automatically. Otherwise it was "Upgrade to version 5.x" a few months after upgrading to 3.12 (done by another consultant). This is not taking care of your customers.
And the fact that you can only administer a NetWare 5.x server from a Windows 9x workstation - how dumb. How terminally dumb.
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