First Allison now Haeger, is there any personality left in Novell?

I've been a Novell engineer for over ten years and could even be considered a zealot. I have to agree at least to some degree however, with David's criticism of Novell's ability to engage its customer and partner-base in a plain English (or German, or Spanish, or whatever), no-nonsense manner. While Novell is a company that has always had some great (and one or two not-so-great) products – it has never understood that when it comes to marketting, sometimes less is more. A reversal of signal to noise ratio would be a good place to start. Also, for a company with strong directory services and identity management offerings, management of partner and customer identity has been less than entirely user-friendly over the years. Strategically, Novell have sometimes shown flashes of brilliance (support for open source being one) but tactically they have often been too inflexible to respond to more agile competitors. Does anyone else remember the day that the Perfect Office suite effectively died, when Microsoft halved the price of MS Office? Novell, the new owner of Word Perfect, did not follow suit (at least in our local market) and the office productivity suite war was effectively over here. Many of us old timer Novell engineers still hang on though, migrating our aging old NetWare boxes to OES and SLES Linux, learning to live in Gnome or KDE rather than Windows desktops, dipping our gnarled old toes in the XEN virtualization water and hoping that one day the marketing and pseudo-technocratic management speak noise will fade away and the clear simple message will ring out... :-) I guess my point is that you can be critical of something because you want it to succeed, as well as because you 'hate' it.