Novell execs are basically saying that purchase of Linux company Ximian means that NetWare is a dead product. While they expect to support it and see its use for years to come, new development will stop, and existing services and software (eDirectory, GroupWise) will become Linux products.
This is probably a smart move on Novell’s part. Due to chronic, decades-long mismanagement of their flagship NOS, they’ve basically given the market away to Micro$oft. (Coincidentally, yesterday we received a briefing from our server ops guy about the planned office migration from NetWare and NDS over to NT and AD.)
Still, NetWare (like VM/SP) will always have a place in my heart. It’s the NOS I grew up with, technically, cutting my teeth on its management from v3 to v5. It sort of feels like an auto manufacturer is discontinuing a particular model line, the one I first bought.
Ah, well. Time marches on (and usually to Redmond’s beat).
Same here; it was the first NOS I ever played with and learned. Novell, like other companies before it, totally blew it and handed over supremacy to MS by simply refusing to recognize their own strengths.
I mean, really, remember when Novell bought WordPerfect? What the hell were they thinking?
Novell is going to make a great (negative) case study in biz schools one of these days. Every year (if not every quarter), they seized on some Great New Strategic Direction, followed by studious silence and squandering of resources until the next press release. If they’d spend half as much on advertising to CIOs as they did on reprinting business cards, they’d own the network market.
Buying WP was not necessarily a bad idea per se. Though it was long past its prime (largely because WP, like Lotus, though this Windows thang was a passing fad — and because M$ monkeywrenched their early efforts), they could have made a decent go of it — if they could have resolved to be an application suite company. Otherwise, it was just more squandered capital.