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Indeed. It's easy to laugh at CIOs and CTOs, but many of them try their best with the options they have available. I'm reminded of this anecdote I had with a c
by mickeyp 4y ago
Indeed. It's easy to laugh at CIOs and CTOs, but many of them try their best with the options they have available.
I'm reminded of this anecdote I had with a colleague a while back. He was railing against MS Exchange's rise back in the 90s, and how Novell Netware was better and that he was forced to switch their org to MS Exchange, back then, solely because "His CIO read it was the future in a magazine."
And so it was. Today, Netware's dead.
- naasking 4y ago> solely because "His CIO read it was the future in a magazine." And so it was. Today, Netware's dead. Could have been a self-fulfilling prophecy, and not something that would have happened without CIOs reading that magazine.
- owl57 4y agoCould be. That would mean it was good judgement to read the magazine that the other CIOs were also reading.
- nradov 4y agoThe magazine wasn't wrong. NetWare was a real mess architecturally. The core file and printer sharing features worked great. But as an application server for email, database, or anything else it was a dead end. No memory protection, no real multitasking, bizarre proprietary API, terrible developer tools. One of the major relational database vendors did actually port their product to NetWare but it was a flop in the market. Novell eventually tried to catch up by grafting their proprietary networking features onto Unix but that was too little, too late. The CIOs who started migrating off of NetWare early were the smart ones.
- therealcamino 4y agoI agree completely. But man, it was pretty amazing as a file server for DOS machines. You could boot a roomful of diskless PCs over ethernet from a 386 server, and for most uses the speed felt like you had a local hard drive in each one.
- hackandthink 4y agoNovell was no fun. I ported a C++ server and struggled with the only available C++ Compiler for Novell (Watcom). Debugging meant staring at core dumps. Novell bought SUSE too late.
- ilyt 4y agoMarketing to decision makers is true and tested method to make inferior product popular tho