Elliott Associates to Buy Novell?

Elliott Associates made an offer for Novell today at almost US$2 billion ($5.75 per share). GigaOM reported on this, as did the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal.

There is as yet no response from Novell; company officials are expected to announce their response on Wednesday, 3 March 2010.

Any takeover would affect a large number of things, including open source projects and current Linux offerings. Some of these include:

• Novell v. SCO. This court case is over the copyrights to the UNIX name and code; it remains open and active, in spite of SCO’s bankruptcy filing.
• SUSE. Novell’s acquisition of SUSE brought SUSE under the Novell umbrella, and there are several products available, including the open source OpenSUSE.
• Ximian. Ximian was acquired by Novell years ago, which brought Linux GNOME expertise in-house and led to the development of Mono for Linux.
• Groupwise. Groupwise is Novell’s competition to Microsoft’s Exchange.

This should be interesting; let’s see what Novell says tomorrow.

Why Internet Explorer 6 Refuses to Die

Internet Explorer 6 was one of the ways that Google and many other companies were attacked recently. Web developers have hated it for a long time because of its lack of stability and lack of standards support.

IE 6 is the default browser shipped with Windows XP, and routinely is placed into lists of one of the worst technical products ever. Google announced in January that they would stop supporting IE 6 (which means YouTube will no longer work in IE 6). The French and German governments strongly advised (link in French) against using Internet Explorer in January 2010, in part because of security risks in IE 6. There are campaigns everywhere advocating against the use of IE 6.

So why is it still alive and supported by Microsoft? Over at the IT Expert Voice, one writer was determined to find out. The article is very interesting, and listed a number of reasons that IE 6 is still being used in spite of it all:

• Upgrades comes slowly. If you upgrade your systems on a three to five year cycle, then IE 6 is very likely still present on the network.
• A critical application requires IE 6. This is quite unfortunate, but happens often enough. If the vendor hasn’t converted to a more standards-compliant environment, the users can’t either.
• “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.” This is almost a “head-in-the-sand” approach – or an extreme reluctance to upgrade at all. Hopefully, this is not common.
• Using IE 6 can limit users to more appropriate sites. This reason is also incomprehensible: certainly the more popular sites will fail to work in the future with IE 6 – but IE 6 is also a security risk and more and more work-related sites will stop using IE 6 as well. I can’t imagine anyone would seriously use this as a reason to keep IE 6 – but apparently some have.

CNet also had an interesting article about why Intel continues to use IE 6; it is an excellent read.

Error Messages: Who Needs ‘Em?

There was a very interesting post over at Slashdot where a reader asked the gathered populace how to get users to read error messages.

The question, to some, might sound trite or like the standard complaining from technical support staff – and yet, this is a real problem and is wrestled with by technical staff and by usability engineers as well.

There were a number of interesting responses (and thoughts) to this question:

• Force users to read it. In one case, the support staff put a code within the text of the error message, and required entry of the code to continue. Users who called saying they were stuck were told to read the error message to the support staff – at which time, the user typically said “Oh, never mind…” Alternately, another story told of a site that stopped people cold at an error message, requiring them to call technical support. If they tried to bypass the message with a reboot, the offending application would not work for 15 minutes.
• Start using error messages appropriately. This requires more work by developers, but the idea is that users are so used to error messages that are meaningless that they ignore them entirely.
• People will filter out things that are unexpected or don’t fit the model. This is backed up by research (apparently) of fighter pilots who, during a simulation, overwhelmingly blotted out the fact that there were huge items in their path on the runway. In another famous case, people were given something to watch (a conversation I think it was) and no one reported the huge gorilla (yes!) that wandered through the picture.
• Pictures are more easily noted and remembered. Some suggested using pictures – one or two said they had done this with excellent results.

What do you think about error messages? How do you get users to read them?