Novell thinks that Vista will wind up doing more for Linux than it will do for Microsoft. The company expects that when companies are confronted by the cost of moving to Windows Vista, they will be more attracted to Linux. Novell chief executive Jack Messman claimed that the cost of migrating to Windows XP to Vista will be higher than the cost of migrating to Linux, and that this may well set things in motion for a large scale move to Linux by businesses. He concedes that Novell's desktop Linux offering has less functionality than Microsoft Office, but believes that this is in fact a positive thing.
Messman claimed that certain features of Office allowed employees to waste time at work by making it easy for them to browse non-work related sites. "Do you really want to pay for all the excess functionality in Windows that distracts your employees and reduces their productivity?"
Several large corporations and organisations have migrated to Novell's desktop Linux package, including SEB Eesti UHispank, the largest bank in Estonia. The municipality of Baerum in Norway is also migrating several schools to the platform.