Chris Stone, long-term president of the Object Management Group, is leaving to join his old friend Eric Schmidt at Novell Inc, where he will become senior vice president of strategy and corporate development from September 2. He follows old object colleague John Slitz, now Novell’s senior vice president of marketing, to the company. Slitz left OMG a few years ago to become IBM Corp’s VP objects. Stone, who has been heading the OMG since 1989, joining from Data General Corp (CI No 1,163), will remain as chairman of the board. Richard Soley, technical director, and Bill Hoffman, marketing director, will share the office of co-president. Stone will stay on the East Coast and going to beef up Novell’s presence in Wellesley near Boston. Expect object technologies to become a key ingredient of Novell’s plan to develop Infrastructure for distributed computing. Details, see story in Barbed Wire.