While Microsoft still has the monopoly on the desktop market with its Windows operating system, Novell is readying new features and functionality that it believes will propel its Novell Linux Desktop offering into the mass market. The current Novell Linux Desktop 9, which was released last November, is targeted not at the mass market but rather at those customers with more contained workloads. But all of that is set to change with the next version of the product, Novell Linux Desktop 10, scheduled for release next year.
"The next generation of product will appeal to and meet the needs of the mass consumer market," Nat Friedman, vice president of Linux desktop engineering at Novell Inc., told eWEEK in an interview at Novell's BrainShare conference here. "There is this perfect storm of things coming together, and much of this will be seen in the SLES [SuSE Linux Enterprise Server] 10 time frame." Friedman also has big plans for version 10 of the Linux desktop, which are matched by equally big claims. "We are getting ahead of [Microsoft] Windows for the first time," he said. "The release of SuSE Linux 9.2 brought a lot of innovative mobility features, while 9.3 has a variety of Mono-based applications."
News source: eWeek
