Crumbs
Rich T finds some tasty titbits you might have missed in the week's news
Thursday 25 January 2007, 6:04 PM
Just how successful is the MS/Novell pact?
It was the fourth deal Microsoft has shouted about since it started doing business with Novell in the autumn, following wins with Credit Suisse, AIG and Deutsche Bank.
But this 'win' doesn't feel quite right. Walmart owns Asda in the UK, and, what with Walmart and Microsoft being global companies, it only seemed right to want to know how Asda were going to start utilising Novell open source infrastructure.
Both myself and Andy McCue at our sister site Silicon.com" have been on the case for more information. But we've both been met by a stony silence.
Microsoft's UK publicists knew little of how Asda would benefit. When pushed, they said they couldn't answer my questions.
Asda said I'd need to speak to their US parent. Walmart wouldn't speak to me.
Usually companies jump at the chance of publicising their partnerships, so this stony silence is starting to concern me.
Is Walmart really getting many benefits from Microsoft/Novell? Or is it all just one big publicity stunt?
It's just a bit ironic that Microsoft's chief operating officer Kevin Turner is a former vice president of Walmart.
PreviousComments on this post
I find it bizarre that you would expect a global organisation to roll out new software to all users in all countries more-or-less simultaneously. Walmart is a big enough company that its various divisions may have worthwhile business reasons for using different software, and for doing so in the long term.
While there may be a question as to how big the deal with Walmart is, in terms of how many units of software the deal covers, and how many divisions in Walmart are affected, I don't think your ad-hoc queries to ASDA provide any useful information at all, other than to demonstrate that it wasn't a completely global Walmart decision. It doesn't have to be a global decision to still be, perhaps, a significant decision.
Cheers, Anthony Coates.
