Errors and omissions sometimes creep into these newsletters. Most of the time the errors are minor and don't change the conclusion. But to anyone noticing them, they can be jarring, they can disrupt your train of thought and they can cause the reader to stop and ask, "Well, what else did he get wrong?" When that happens, and when a few of you point out the error, I try to make a point of correcting it. Two recent newsletters had factual errors that, while not important in terms of the topic or conclusion, did cause some readers to take the time to tell me about them. So it's important to issue corrections.

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about the correspondence that Blum Capital Partners, a major investor in Novell stock, had with the board of directors in which Blum made suggestions for improving Novell's bottom line. In that newsletter, I said that Blum recommended that Novell "sell or spin off Celerant Consulting, the British firm recently acquired by Novell," and that Novell also "sell or spin off Cambridge Technology Partners, the consulting firm which - in effect - acquired Novell a few years ago since most of the upper management now in place at Novell came from CTP."

The factual error has to do with the consulting firms' names. "Celerant" is the name now used by what used to be Cambridge Technology Partners. The British consultant firm acquired by Novell was Salmon, LLC. I apologize for the error, but the thrust of the paragraph - that Blum suggested Novell divest itself of both companies - doesn't change.

A couple of people also quibbled with my statement that "most of the upper management now in place at Novell came from" CTP. More than one person told me that only 6 of the 14 people on Novell's "Worldwide Management Committee" have roots with CTP. The quibble here is what constitutes "upper management." A number of the people on that committee have little to do with company-wide management. They are, generally, former executives of company's that Novell has acquired since the CTP takeover. Some others who came along with CTP (especially in the sales organization) have recently departed. But I still hold the opinion that a majority of the people with company-wide oversight came from CTP. This amounts, in my mind, to a difference of opinion rather than a factual discrepancy. And, in any case, it's not actually germane to the discussion of Blum Capital's suggestions.

Last week's error was purely factual, but again had no direct impact on the conclusions drawn. In talking about the reluctance of many people to upgrade operating systems every time a new one is released, I referred to both Windows NT 5 and Windows 2000. These are, of course, one and the same. The operating system released as Windows 2000 was known as "NT 5" during much of its beta test phase. In fact, the released product still identifies itself internally as "NT 5." Still, anything that causes the reader to get pulled out of the conversation, to pull them up short, saying "can that be right?" is a problem. I apologize for that.

Now lest you think that I'm the only one who makes mistakes in NetWare/Novell stories, there was a big flap last week which, on closer inspection, is only a tempest in a teapot. We'll talk about that next time.

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To contact Dave Kearns:

Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. He's written a number of books including the (sadly) now out of print "Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks." His musings can be found here.