When two companies the size of Novell Inc and Lotus Development Corp decide on a merger, the initial justification for such a move seems to lie simply in the fact that for large companies to rely on just one product is potentially life-threatening. However, at yesterday’s International NetWare Users Conference in London, representatives of Novell had a go at convincing the audience that the merger was not so much sensible long-term corporate strategy as an exercise in customer care. After an ambitious preamble attempting to put the Novell-Lotus merger into the context of a world of change, Novell’s senior vice-president of international operations Ernst Gemassner firstly told the assembled users that Novell and Lotus had started a revolution that would bring the user increased freedom of choice – certainly, fitting words at a user conference, but hardly consistent with Gemassner’s second and more credible line of reasoning that it would provide customers with a single point of purchase for networking and applications, since the eventual aim of providing a single point of purchase is to make buying from one shop pre-eminently attractive. When this apparent paradox was pointed out by an AT&T representative, who was somewhat insulted by the complete exclusion of Unix’s impact from Gemassner’s market split flow charts, Gemassner then claimed that no pressure would be brought to bear on the customer concerning his choice of hardware and applications – a fine claim, but one that nonetheless undermines the strength of the single point of purchase argument. At a user conference it is naturally to be expected that emphasis is put on showing the customer where he fits into the scheme of things, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that, when it came to explaining the present merger, talk of customer care had limited relevance. The real point was finally touched on when Gemassner hinted that what the merger brought to Novell and Lotus was a corporate infrastructure that could begin to rival that of Microsoft in size, and ultimately, in diversity; now, with the additional resources of Lotus, the WordPerfect Corp announcement of support for the new company, and Sybase Inc indirectly involved through Lotus Development Corp’s equity stake in it, a better balance of size and diversity exists than before the merger – and that, surely, is all the justification needed for the moment: whether it can benefit the five million NetWare users, the 10m 1-2-3 users, and indeed Novell and Lotus Development themselves, only time can tell. – Mark John
