Guest post – Michael Miller, Vice President, Alliances and Marketing, SUSE
To accelerate our growth as we become an independent business unit, SUSE is re-doubling our focus on the enterprise Linux market. We will continue to deliver a rock-solid and easy-to-manage platform for the key environments our customers demand – physical and virtual, on-premise and in the cloud. We will focus, innovate and lead, by delivering solutions that help IT and the business become more agile, efficient and responsive.
As a result of this increased focus on our core market, we will better align our future investments with business results. Focusing on what matters most to customers is the key to our innovation strategy and will drive the growth of our business. This has meant reductions in certain areas, such as Mono. However, Mono remains part of the SUSE business and should customer demand for Mono products accelerate, our development efforts will rapidly respond. Regardless, we will continue to provide maintenance and support for all Mono products – MonoTouch, Mono for Android, Mono Tools for Visual Studio and SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension.
Our robust support for other OSS projects continues as strong as ever. We're ardent supporters of openSUSE, Linux kernel, Xen, KVM, GNOME, KDE and Linux-HA, among countless others. Since the company's founding in 1992, open source has been at the heart of our business and we look forward to playing a pivotal role in numerous open source communities for decades to come. SUSE remains a Gold Member of the Linux Foundation and we are privileged to provide financial support, development contributions, technical expertise, mentorship and promotional support to many of the people and organizations that make our Linux ecosystem so dynamic.
We're excited about the future of SUSE, as our increased focus will help us better serve customers and ultimately take share in this rapidly growing market. IDC's recent report on the Linux market shows that Novell/SUSE has increased our market share in each of the last three years – the only vendor to do so! With an even sharper focus on our core business, greater prominence for the SUSE brand, and closer collaboration with customers, partners and communities, we're aiming even higher.
How can you possibly say you are providing support to MonoTouch and Mono for Android customers when you FIRED the ENTIRE teams who created and supported those products?
This sounds like you're dodging the issue, and as a customer of both of those products I don't like it one bit. If you had really planned on supporting these products you would have kept at least some of the team.
What do you have to say to that?
"Regardless, we will continue to provide maintenance and support for all Mono products – MonoTouch, Mono for Android, Mono Tools for Visual Studio and SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension."
Sorry, but having fired the entire team, and _totally_ ignored the community that _already_ exists around MT, MD and the other tools for the past month, I find this very hard to believe.
Please prove me wrong.
Your statement was pretty open regarding to what will happen to Mono and Mono products, like MonoTouch and Mono for Android. What does it mean?
Does that mean you guys will continue to sell and support MonoTouch? How about things like reactivating licenses, or fixing existing issues with the current version? Any statement on that?
How is Attachmate going to provide MonoTouch and Mono for Android support when it's laid off so many Mono-focused employees?
Wouldn't it make more sense to give/sell the MonoTouch/Mono for Android IP to Xamarin?
Please let us know when you will have the following features added/fixed in Mono for Android:
1. Debugging in Visual Studio. Performance of the debugger is not good. Many features that VS developers expect are not working properly. When will you have this issue resolved?
2. Performance of mono for android applications is not up to par with java applications. What is your schedule for improving performance?
3. When will you support Android Honeycomb 3.0 and 3.1?
4. What are you plans for support the next version of iOS tentatively titled iOS 5? Will you be able to continually provide support within 48-72 hours of a new version shipping?
5. Who is the face of the new Mono, Monotouch, and Mono for Android? Who are the new team members? What has been their invovlement with the community? How do I contact them, as I previously had the contact info for various team members?
6. When will we see the next update to Monotouch and Mono for Android? What are you current plans?
7. What are your plans to attend the Monospace conference so that the community can meet these people?
>We will continue to provide maintenance and support for all Mono products.
That's great. So, why hasn't there been any activity from Novell on the Mono for Android Bugzilla site since before May 10?
Really, Continue to support MonoTouch? I have 2 outstanding email requests sent to both Novell and Attachmate support addresses over a week ago and I've yet to receive any response.
This is now my 3rd formal request, I am recording the date/time of all my formal requests.
The MonoTouch support forums have been unmanned since you laid off the entire Mono team. There are tonnes of outstanding issues, your activation server isn't working and there is not a hint that you're willing or able to resolve customer issues.
Where exactly is the best place to send Mono/MonoTouch issues? No one has seen an ounce of support.
This is by far the worst customer service I've witnessed and as a MonoTouch customer I'm saddened that I've been recommending a dead-end product which has made me look very bad professionally.
It is clear that my significant investment in my MonoTouch properties will never see the light of day, and I'll now have to rewrite it in Objective-C since you're incapable of supporting your own products.
At a minimum I would like a refund on my MonoTouch purchase.
My email is demis.bellot@gmail.com
Could you please explain what advantages SUSE has that lead enterprise customers to choose it over RedHat?
"However, Mono remains part of the SUSE business and should customer demand for Mono products accelerate, our development efforts will rapidly respond. Regardless, we will continue to provide maintenance and support for all Mono products"
Good grief. Is it possible for a corporate executive to be anything but disingenuous? How do you plan to maintain and support Mono products with no staff? Everyone knows that you laid off the entire Mono development team and that your Mono products are dead ends with no future. Demand for your Mono products will do nothing be tank until you finally pull the plug on support entirely.
Do a favor to all the people who care about Mono and want to see it be successful. Either re-hire the Mono staff and spin off the Mono products as a separate company that will live or die on its own merits. Or work out a deal to transfer ownership of your Mono properties to DeIcaza's startup Xamarin. Given your current direction, this is the only way your Mono product customers will receive the kind of support that they want and need.
The alternative is to hold onto your Mono properties until they eventually become worthless because of your refusal to invest in or support them. If you do that you've demonstrated that you really don't care about your customers at all.
The Monotouch web site is down, getting an error about the database server.
All Mono(Touch) developers had to leave the company. How do you want to provide support for it? Who's going to fix/update MonoTouch now that Apple is going to release the next version of iOS?
…"should customer demand for Mono products accelerate, our development efforts will rapidly respond."
How can you rapidly respond when all your IP builders were fired? Once you let the people go who work on the product it is dead. You can't bring them back later. They will have moved on to other positions, companies, and more importantly you have shattered their belief in you as the benefactor of the product. I seriously doubt you will gain more customer interest with this type of news.
I think as far as MonoTouch and Mono For Android is concerned it seems fairly clear from the Corporate PR statement above that it is not worth buying it from yourselves, so I'm waiting now for Xamarin to complete their products before I make a purchase of any C# tools for iOS and Android as they have been very clear and direct about their future direction and support of these products. You have sealed the fate of your products with this vague statement as is probably the intention.