I thought Active Directory was Microsoft’s response to the competitive threat from other X.500-inspired, proprietary directory products, most notably Novell’s N

I thought Active Directory was Microsoft’s response to the competitive threat from other X.500-inspired, proprietary directory products, most notably Novell’s NDS, which met the needs of large organizations in ways that Windows NT domains couldn’t. LDAP and Kerberos were in use before Active Directory, of course, but they weren’t ubiquitous the way HTML, HTTP, or IP had become by 1999, so I’m not sure the “embrace” stage of the strategy fits. Certainly, there were marketing advantages for Microsoft from using well-regarded open standards with at least nominal cross-platform compatibility, and some customers who would have expected any serious directory server to work with LDAP clients.