http://www.osnews.com/story/16123/Ray_Noorda_The_CEO_Who_Led_Novell_To_LAN_Dominance_Dies_At_82 Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:50:23 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?170384 http://osnews.com/thread?170384 eom Tue, 10 Oct 2006 15:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (2fargone) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?170429 http://osnews.com/thread?170429 End of an era :-( Tue, 10 Oct 2006 16:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (twenex) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?170477 http://osnews.com/thread?170477 However, if you look at how MS thrived even though it was non-interoperative and closed as you ever get, while Novell went damn close to sinking... somehow I feel being the nice guy in this world, doesn't pay. Tue, 10 Oct 2006 18:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (mario) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?170485 http://osnews.com/thread?170485 Novell fell victim to the MS behemoth in the 90's for much the same reason as other top-of-their-game competitors did, they underestimated Microsoft's determination. I remember selling Netware back in the day, an absolute ton of it, and the Novell reps laughed at the thought of NT ever becoming dominant in a client/server architecture. After all, it was GUI-based, so how could anyone take it seriously?

Still, hindsight is 20/20 vision. Netware certainly laid the groundwork for PC networking as we know it today and in that context may even have had a bigger impact on business computing than even Microsoft did. And despite Redmond's best efforts, they still haven't entirely succeeded in ripping Netware out of every datacenter.

Not too shabby, and a pretty decent legacy. Tue, 10 Oct 2006 19:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (elsewhere) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?170534 http://osnews.com/thread?170534 Without question, Ray Noorda was a brilliant guy, but I think that two of the reasons that Novell fell were that (1) they hung onto vertical integration too long, and (2) they failed to embrace a GUI for server administration. On the first point, there was a time when you could only buy Novell servers prepackaged on proprietary hardware. The problem was that Novell's competitors -- namely, Dell, HP, and others -- started selling servers running commodity hardware and software (Windows NT). Novell's solution was more expensive, with little practical benefit. Don't get me wrong: Novell produced a good product ... but it was difficult for them to compete against this juggernaut. It's the same dynamic that Sun ran into on low end servers (and eventually Apple, on the desktop). As for administration, you can whine and moan about how "real administrators don't use a GUI" but that's backwards thinking. NT started taking significant market share away from Novell based on ease-of-use. Nonetheless, Noorda should be remembered for popularizing LANs and WANs. Tue, 10 Oct 2006 21:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (tomcat) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?170587 http://osnews.com/thread?170587 Thanks Ray for the staggering amount of great technology you have produced with Novell in the past - you really paved the way with Netware. Tue, 10 Oct 2006 22:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (i386) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?170603 http://osnews.com/thread?170603 I have to disagree with you. NetWare was/is built in a way that little or no server based administration was needed. A majority of the work done on the server was NDS, which is a multi master database. There were/are plenty of gui based tools for Novell's products, in fact, too many. Novell's biggest issues were two fold. First, they didn't offer a good development tools. You have to buy Metroworks Code Warrior to built any NLMs, which run on NetWare. Even then, NetWare is known to be a difficult platform to develop for. It's memory protection has always been an issue. Only in the past half decade or so(NetWare 5.1 maybe?) did running NLMs in protected mode become available. It's file systems, while advanced for thier time in terms of pure file storage and permissions, is not the best file system for applications. I'd still pick NSS over every file system out there for file server duties.

So in turn, NetWare was not a viable platform for third party development. Without that, management would look past Microsoft's failings in file/print/directory services so some new app which only runs on Microsoft's platform made Netware less and less apealing. That's why Novell got into the Linux arena. 3rd party development. There's no other reason. That's why they bought UNIX and created UnixWare with the idea of merging it with NetWare. It was going to be their way of getting third party developers. Someone made the bonehead mistake of canning that idea and selling it to SCO...or licensing it...the courts have to sort that out.

And for the GUI administration tools, for short sighted IT management with little or no technical knowledge, yes, that might have been a reason. Tue, 10 Oct 2006 22:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (IanSVT) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?170658 http://osnews.com/thread?170658 Thanks for dropping the BSD lawsuit and to rather compete in the marketplace.Edited 2006-10-11 02:50 Wed, 11 Oct 2006 02:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (happycamper) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?170699 http://osnews.com/thread?170699 Netware 3.2 was my first server / network operating system I layes my hand on. It was stable, very stable! Still remember how I had struggled to enable long filenames :-)

RIP, you did improve the world. Wed, 11 Oct 2006 09:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (evert) Comments