But you are saying it will go into maintenance mode.
Well, there will be a maintenance mode, but there will always be some functionality that we add to it. As I've said, we have already committed to do that. That's what NetWare 7 is. There will be additional functionality in NetWare because customers do want additional features.
You have likened this to Apple moving from the Macintosh to Mac OS X.
That's right. It is a very similar model in that all of the functionality and the services that were in the Mac now run on a completely different platform (that is essentially) FreeBSD, whereas in the past it was a proprietary platform.
It was very similar. But the Macintosh didn't go away and neither will NetWare. The point here is that we are not dropping anything to do with NetWare, we are adding Linux to it. Services is where the differentiation comes into play. Even in the Linux world -- kernel to kernel -- that really isn't the issue. The issue is what is you run on it. What are the services you are going to provide to customers?
What is your Linux strategy?
Linux to Novell is a huge opportunity for us. As you may have noticed, the amount of applications and services for Linux in the enterprise is very minimal. For 15-plus years Novell has been building very robust, enterprise-class applications and services, none of which exist today in a fairly commercial way for Linux.
And we see that as an opportunity...we also hear it from our customers. Customers are telling us that they want to move to a different platform -- to this new platform. So, there you have it. It just makes sense.
If I came to you five years ago and asked what is NetWare, the answer would have been that it's an OS.
You are absolutely right. We said it's an OS. But the reality is that commoditisation of technology continues to happen. Kernels are free. App servers are becoming commoditised. The same thing with Web servers. You have got to differentiate yourself further up the stack....It is natural for us to take what we have done on NetWare -- what we commonly called an OS five years ago -- and placed them on the Linux platform. Now you can mix and match. You couldn't do on NetWare. You couldn't do that on Windows either.
So, when we talk about NetWare in another five years...
People will still be buying NetWare.
