Pinballed into pissed off

I learned something pretty important about about making sure you make your information clear to the press. In the process, I somehow managed to really annoy a lot of people in the Linux community who follow SUSE LINUX with a passion. It’s all related to a recently published online article.

Here’s what happened: I was at a big analyst conference in Orlando, Gartner’ s fall Symposium. I was waiting for an analyst session about open source to begin, hoping to learn how Gartner advises customers to approach open source products. Someone struck up a conversation with me while waiting. When I introduced myself and what I did to this gentleman, another’s ears perked up. Within a couple minutes I was in an informal interview with Mr. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of eWeek fame.

One of the things he asked me about was how Novell Linux Desktop relates to SUSE LINUX Professional. I told him how Novell was gearing one for use as a business desktop for companies who needed the quality and security assurance of a major vendor backing their desktop distro, while SLPro is more geared to be a retail-available product targeted at enthusiasts and the community, sort of like Fedora. (That last little clause was my mistake: I should have been much more explicit.)

Well, that became a statement that SLPro would become more like Red Hat’s Fedora. And that bounced off of eWeek into the community that Novell was going to dump SLPro into community development–a step that had gained a fair amount of bad will among the Red Hat faithful. And that became: Novell is effectively killing SUSE LINUX. In hindsight, this whole transformation of my meaning makes complete sense, and I feel like I should have caught it as I said it to Vaughan-Nichols.

Well, I didn’t, and it followed the above course, whereupon I become made akin in evil to one of Bill “Zabub” Gates’ twisted minions.

I explained what the mistake was on a usenet group, and I’ve seen that little meme bounce around for a bit. (Last seen here.)

Most people have responded that my true meaning makes sense, and thanked me for the clarification. But, of course, conspiracy theories are all to easily propagated among the bulletin-board frequenters. One hypothesis was that Novell was actually leaking the idea as a test to see how the community would react.

If only I were so clever.

But under the conspiracy, isn’t that what you would expect me to say?

Adventures in Blogging

Over the past months I have starting on a very different path of activities in my career. I’m working in a company that is rapidly becoming a huge proponent open source.
Short history of my career: I’ve always been pretty capable in technology and have wound about a career that started in teaching desktop, and later, networking software. One of the companies whose software I taught, Novell, hired me as a sales engineer in September 1997, and I did that for a couple years. Then I moved into product management, where I did a lot of marketing work. Then I moved into a more traditional form of product management, and shortly thereafter quickly moved up a level into a director’s role. As responsibilities got added to the position, I soon had marketing responsibilities again. After a re-organization I found myself as a role as director of marketing for one of the key products Novell is soon bringing to market: Novell Linux Desktop.
Marketing open source software is something of a new frontier, and I don’t know whether anyone has really started to document their experience with it. So I thought it might provide people some interest to be able to see what its like and what I do.
I intend to cover a lot of different topics in this blog. Since I’m not formally trained in marketing, and the audience I would like to attract may include developers and open source enthusiasts as much as it does marketeers, I’ll explain my understanding of some marketing fundamentals. I’ll also cover some of the things I am learning about open source, mis-steps I make with the community, and what I find that works and what doesn’t. I’m also prone to conjecture, but not afraid to be wrong. So I’ll consider allowing transparency of reader comments as long as they don’t get too nasty.

We’ll see whether I stick to plan. Follow-through on personal web content has not been one of my strengths in the past. (www.reverendted.com has been down for nearly 3 years now and never got much in the way of refresh while I had it up.)

–Rev