Doctor's orders

Novell CEO Dr Eric Schmidt recently made his first visit to Europe,where he outlined the vendor's latest overhaul. Guy Clapperton wassufficiently moved by it to write a letter to him. It missed the post, sowe're printing it here.

Dear DR SCHMIDT

You probably won't have heard of me. I am a freelance journalist who has been following Novell since January 1989, and frankly I'm a little bemused. You may recall that you recently came to the UK as the new head honcho and were suitably charismatic as the new golden boy. OK, it's all showbiz, we understand, but it was a polished performance. Honestly, everyone wishes you the best of luck, it's just that a few commentators are finding it hard to imagine any real turnaround in the company until something radical happens.

I DID IT MY RAY

And judging by your appearance in Europe, nothing radical is on the way.

Whether it ought to be is another matter, but that is what the critics are clamouring for.

Let's start at the beginning. In the olden days there was CEO Ray Noorda and a whole bunch of techies in Utah. Novell, in fact, was as well known for being run by Mormons as it was for supplying print and file server software, which was about all the systems of the day could do. But it was solid business and extremely profitable, and the shareholders seemed to like it.

Then things got a little peculiar. It all began when Novell bought Digital Research.

Don't get me wrong - Digital Research was a nice little company which, for a time, had a credible alternative to MS-Dos. Delicious rumours circulated that IBM only took Microsoft's version because the DR people were too busy to see the Men In Blue, whereas Bill Gates wasn't. All very entertaining, but it began to look like Noorda thought he could play Microsoft at its own game. There was talk that he'd made it his personal mission to 'save the industry from Bill', and this was reinforced when he bought WordPerfect and all its applications.

I wonder, did you ever use the shortlived Novell Office suite? Once called Borland Office, it changed name when it was owned by the company you now run and is currently bubbling under as Corel Office. Some packaging manufacturer is making a fortune out of this.

Then Novell bought Unix too, and for a while it looked as though you really were trying to take on Microsoft head to head. It had NT, you had Unix. It had Word, you had WordPerfect. It didn't last.

AT THE CONTROLS

We'll fast forward over the grisly bits - Noorda retiring, Bob Frankenberg coming in and selling off the various bits and pieces, DR-Dos (or as it was briefly known, Novell Dos) getting canned, Novell executives being briefed to admit: 'The battle for the desktop has been fought and Microsoft has won.'

One of your UK general managers said that to me once. I had the impression he knew, deep down, that it was blindingly obvious, and was embarrassed at having to hold off confirming it for so long.

COMMAND HQ

About a year ago, I went to see the newly refurbished Bracknell HQ of the company that had once looked so damned big. The WordPerfect product suite, except PerfectOffice (sensibly renamed GroupWise so people didn't think it was yet another bundle of office applications), had gone. Corel had it, and WordPerfect was demanding 16Mb of Ram; presumably it rendered all the full stops individually. Unixware also received the royal order of the boot.

Novell had got rid of a lot of extraneous stuff. It was almost as if Frankenberg had said: 'OK., guys, what do we actually do for a living?' and decided to do networking and nothing else for a while.

The company was now getting excited about something called directory services. This was the sort of thing Banyan used to bang on about at great length, except it was called Pipes if I recall correctly. Knowing who was in your network and monitoring their permissions and privileges seemed to make sense at the time. Still does, come to think of it.

And now, Mr Schmidt, we cut to the present day and you're in place. A full-blown company relaunch to look at product hype (but who's going to look at the hype?) and your first speech in Europe as CEO.

FALSE IMPRESSION

It got off to a slightly shaky start - welcoming people to London when they're actually in Slough is likely to give them the wrong impression of our capital city - but geographical anomalies to one side, it was a good performance. The odd side-swipe at Microsoft in the shape of promises that you won't release products until they are ready, is all good clean fun. Everyone in the industry has a go at Microsoft and as long as everyone knows it's nothing personal there's no problem.

But I keep looking at the substance rather than the style and wondering exactly what you've changed. You started off by talking about the history of the company, carefully avoiding any mention of DR-Dos and WordPerfect other than Groupwise, and who could blame you?

Then you started on the new stuff. Charting a course in a networked world, you called it. We're going to move from client-server to client services, you said. In other words, the services that follow an individual around, Net connections and intranet applications, are going to replace the notion of a static server.

We are entering an era of mixed tiers of network connections. Instead of connecting to one point we'll be connecting to multiple platforms, and we won't know what we're hooked up to because the server will be invisible to the internet and intranet user. To an extent this is already happening, and you believe - probably rightly - that it will grow.

You also introduced us to the idea of user-selected services. Until now, a network administrator or even a TV or radio broadcaster has chosen what we see or hear. We can now select our entertainment and business services ourselves.

HERD IT BEFORE

Well, I say you introduced the idea. But in fact, everyone who is interested in the Net has been telling us the same thing for quite some time. Equally, the truth of this statement is limited only by the bandwidth available.

You're ex-Sun, aren't you? No wonder, then, that we heard so much about intranets, platform independence and above all Java. But it sounded a lot like the promises offered by the last management. Maybe the only difference is that you intend to deliver?

Some of your ideas were quite exciting, but unfortunately they are the bits that Novell will have to rely on others to provide. NetWare - or should we be saying IntranetWare by now - is offering a personalised directory service. Everyone on a corporate network can be identified and accorded accesses and permissions, no matter where they happen to be logging on from - a useful addition to network services.

Directory-enabled applications, which fit into this world seamlessly, are a refinement, although you took a risk in announcing it before there are any products to do the job. You don't make applications, after all. Putting security on the map so you can offer trading over the Net is more of a me-too, tick-the-box service than you let on. The notion, then, of basing the entire network around the services rather than a fixed operating system makes sense, although it's not as new as you might have hinted.

Fully distributed data by 1999 becomes a logical extension of this. Your dubbing Java Packets 'Jackets' is just something we'll have to learn to live with, although you might want to consider whether the English language hasn't suffered enough.

But the real meat was in the trimmings. In the question and answer session you mentioned that you'd be happy to acquire small technology companies where they fitted. Indeed, Novell has a history of keeping the best technological bits of everything it has bought. The DR labs still exist and so does the R&D expertise bought in with Unix. GroupWise is gaining ground, and in spite of being divested of all WordPerfect applications, which makes that particular acquisition look like a bit of flop.

You ruled out major partnerships, preferring to be master of your company's destiny, never mind the fact that the word Java came up 50 times in your presentation. You like Sun and you're not a great fan of Microsoft's corporate strategy. OK, we got the message.

The thing is, Eric (you don't mind if I call you Eric, do you?) it's a good strategy. It makes sense. But what I don't understand is why you're making a big song and dance about it.

I'd like to draw a parallel here. Let's talk about pipes. Not network pipes, but the copper things that carry gas or water around my house and, for all I know, probably yours. The strange thing is that until I came to write this letter, I'd never thought about them a great deal. I know where I can buy more when they wear out, and I've put in a couple myself when they need replacing, but I'm not a plumber so I don't think about pipes.

For this very good reason, the people who make pipes don't try to get in touch with me. As long as they're working, I forget they are there.

And that's how it's going to be with directory services. If it works, users won't know it's there or even think about the brand.

You could make sparkling announcements when all this networky stuff was new, but it isn't now. We take it for granted that our computers talk to each other, and yet I still see taxis with the Novell logo on the side and I wonder what the objective might be.

I can't help thinking that you came an awfully long way to announce not an awful lot. The vision - taking your network around with you instead of coming to it at the desk - has been kicking around the Novell community for a hell of a long time, except it used to be called pervasive networking, a phrase I first heard in 1993.

PROMISES, PROMISES

Promising to deliver products rather than just talk about them, and not releasing them until they are ready and working is brave. And you'll be reminded of this every time you release something with bugs. But in principle, it's a nice idea.

Your mission, presumably, is to turn the company around, and a lot of people think you're the man for the job. One of your UK aides told me he was deeply excited by the fact that you gained a solid technical background while at Sun, which equipped you for the job in hand. I wouldn't set too much store by that. Louis Gerstner turned IBM back into profit just as you must be hoping to do for Novell. His background was in breakfast cereal, and his skill must therefore have been in solid business management rather than technical innovation. Bear that in mind and you should stand a reasonable chance of performing well.

SITTING ON THE DOCK OF THE BAY

Your critics - and there were a fair few at the launch - were baying for more marketing spend. Tell everyone what's going on, help the resellers sell things, generate pull-through demand at distribution level - I heard it all from your audience. Holding a major shindig and flying a load of journalists over to Slough was an example of doing precisely that, I suppose.

But at the same time, you seemed somewhat reluctant - you said all the marketing in the world wasn't going to make up for a bad or late product, and you wanted something to say before becoming the aggressive marketeer.

Even then, you're determined to stick to the backroom infrastructure that Novell's good at, rather than the glamorous front-end Windowy stuff.

That's all to the good, but it clashes with what your partners and critics seem to want. They want the razzmatazz of yesteryear, I'm afraid, no matter how inappropriate it may be.

In other words, your objectives seem realistic. Some of your predecessors' weren't - your shareholders, partners and commentators have had their appetites whetted before by unrealistic aims. Somehow, you now have to reconcile the two extremes. I wish you luck. It's not a job I'd like.

Yours sincerely,

Guy Clapperton