9 ms·

How Novell Netware lost the battle against Windows NT (2013)

106 points by lproven 4y ago

oldnetguy 4y ago
I was a CNE back in the 3.11 days and Microsoft was giving me training and cert vouchers. Novel made me pay a ton to keep my certs. I eventually went Windows.
vhold 4y ago
This article from 1993 has the most important detail missing from the Register article: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1993/08/09/78175/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1993... > The NetWare operating system installed on the server computer acts as a traffic cop, masterminding the flow of information over a network. (The latest version costs $4,695 for 25 users, $47,995 for 1,000.)
- jon-wood 4y ago
  I’m not convinced that was much of a reason. Windows NT 4 Server pricing was similar, with licenses needed for each client connecting, plus additional licensing for the OS running on those clients.
  - EvanAnderson 4y ago
    I was deploying a lot of small office networks in the late 90s. I found NT 3.51 and 4.0 a ton easier to purchase for Customers (i.e. the company I worked for needed a much looser “partnership” arrangement with Microsoft vs. Novell). NT was definitely cheaper, too. That made a difference in small deployments where I was often getting nickel-and-dimed.
  - merlyn 4y ago
    I think licensing was a huge factor in Microsoft winning. Microsoft's license was soft, and depending on the customer buying enough paper to cover, if you could even find a reseller that could describe how to properly license Windows Server (exteremely doubtful). OOTH, Novell's licensing was a hard limit. Once that # of workstations logged in, those without a license were hosed. On all the jobs I did in those days, Novell networks at each customer site _never_ had enough licenses to cover every workstation. There was always somebody left out and they had to go bug people to see if they were done with the network so they could get in their tasks. Nobody ever seemed to overprovision their licenses to cover every single workstation (or even to have extra). I never met a company using Microsoft server that properly had their CALs licensed, and they didn't want to hear it from me. Finding somebody to sell you the proper CALs was an interesting exercise. Most other network server OSes at the time (the Unix vendors were trying hard in this space in those early days too) also had hard licenses. Which was part of why they didn't gain traction at all.
    - EvanAnderson 4y ago
      MSFT licensing being “soft” with enforcement has always seemed like a major strategic advantage for them.
      - TillE 4y ago
        They got serious about license activation in the Windows Vista - Windows 7 era, but now they're back to where anyone can install a Windows license of their choice with just a few commands, using a pirate KMS server.
        Karunamon 4y ago
        The cynical take on this is that Microsoft has pivoted hard into being a services and advertising company, so it is more important to them that you run Windows with all of its data gathering and advertising and cloud BS then it is that you paid for Windows at all. They could easily break the fake KMS but choose not to. It speaks a lot to their priorities.
        robotnikman 4y ago
        That's what I figured as well. To Microsoft right now, more devices running windows = more data gathered, regardless of whether the device was activated by a pirated KMS server or not.
        DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
        LTSB/LTSC doesn't have the anything like the levels of telemetry in the Home SKUs, but even so, as a (former) MSFT SE I can give you my personal assurances that the telemtry is about seeing how the product is used and not for marketing/money-making reasons (beyond, ostensibly, making the product better to entice people to pay for upgrades or subscription services).
        robotnikman 4y ago
  - tssva 4y ago
    The pricing quote is from 1993 when Windows NT 3.1 was released. A Windows NT 3.1 server license cost $1500 and didn't require client access licensing. Many of my clients jumped ship from Netware because of the huge price difference. Almost all of them were pissed when NT 3.5 was released and required client access licensing but having just finished migrating off Netware they weren't going to migrate back.
- Genbox 4y ago
  For everyone else wondering. Prices adjusted for inflation: $4,695 in 1993 is worth $9,682 today. $47,995 is worth $98,982 today
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
Even today when I hear "Network Operating System" I cannot grok what on earth it is supposed to mean. Back in the day when I was trying to understand how to setup these horrors, I remember thinking I was missing something that would magically "work on the network" (at some lower OSI level) not "a server that sent things over the network" If we are talking confusions that killed netware, my money is on marketing "network operating system" as opposed to "buy microsoft NT on your server to run your network"
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Well, Sun did it under 'the network is the computer' so they weren't exactly alone in that. And that story didn't quite have a happy ending either. It think the single biggest factors was the Microsoft was so dominant on the desktop that they had a really strong advantage to beat Novell at their own game with NT as a server operating system. That made it 'single source supplier' which is worth gold to any IT director that doesn't want to get caught in the middle between two parties pointing at each other when things don't work.
  - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
    There is another comment here basically saying "Microsoft was on a serious roll and nothing stood up to them". It's probably the best explanation when so many factors might explain different facets, if you aggregate everything then in the end the favourite to win is the one to bet on.
- starik36 4y ago
  That's exactly it. It was confusing to me as well, still is. Netware basically provided networking and login services - something that Windows NT basically threw in as a "feature" on top of it being a general purpose OS. Netware's demise was a matter of time. I am reading other comments here stating that it was the lack of preemptive multitasking that doomed it. Not even close. Netware was a feature mascarading as an OS.
rzzzt 4y ago
I remember one benchmark that made some waves around 1998-1999: - http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/nts4nw5filesvr.html http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/nts4nw5filesvr.html - http://web.archive.org/web/19990220215149/http://www.novell.com/advantage/nw5/nw5-mindcraftcheck.html http://web.archive.org/web/19990220215149/http://www.novell.... - http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/response-novell-nts4nw5filesvr.html http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/response-novell-nts4nw5...
turbobooster 4y ago
An old friend told me years ago Eric Schmidt was what ruined Novell. Do other people believe that?
- manishsharan 4y ago
  No. It was Ray Noorda's obsession with beating Microsoft and diversifying their focus that was the root cause , in my opinion. However, it was also Ray that led Novell to its glorious heights.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Eric Schmidt ultimately failed to revitalize them in spite of best efforts. But Noorda and Bob Frankenberg have to share at least some of the blame as well--as does a whole lot of internal politics. Novell basically managed to go essentially nowhere through the 1990s while Windows NT was maturing.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  I don't know. I really don't like Schmidt, I think he's one of the biggest hypocrites alive but Novell was arguably already on the way out when he took over. Noorda made it go up, and he saw the beginnings of it going back down and that's when Schmidt was hired, probably in an attempt to turn the tide and avoid the inevitable victory of Microsoft over Novell. But Microsoft really had an unfair advantage and personally I do not think Novell ever had a realistic chance of staying in the race in the longer term.
  - ido 4y ago
    Why is Eric Schmidt one of the biggest hypocrites alive?
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Because he said that we should all just get used to not having privacy any more but when a publication listed the things they found out about Schmidt he said that it should have never been printed.
nobody9999 4y ago
I thought then and still say that had Novell ported IPX/SPX to Unix[0] (they did own Unix in the 90s), Microsoft would never have been able to make them irrelevant. Because the biggest reason Netware lost was the inability to develop software on the platform. This severely limited the value of Netware as a server operating system, as developers (for the most part) prefer to develop on the the platform (cross-compiling for other flavors of *nix doesn't count) for which they're developing software. What's more, IIUC, the development tools for Netware were just awful. Which additionally limited the number of developers working on Netware-related applications. And even those few folks mostly abandoned it as NT gained popularity as a server and a development platform. Had there been a robust user/development environment (like Unix), that likely wouldn't have happened. [0] I am aware that Netware was mostly written in x86 assembler, but porting IPX/SPX and a few other bits and bobs would have allowed Novell to migrate to a Unix platform without having to rewrite the entire OS.
- nradov 4y ago
  Novell actually did port NetWare networking services to Unix in 2005 but by that point it was too late.
  - opless 4y ago
    It was available for a handful of Unix OS in the mid 90s There was also a FOSS NetWare server for Linux at the same time too
    - lproven 4y ago
      It was called MARSNWE, if anyone is curious. A source, ironically from Novell docs. https://www.novell.com/documentation/suse91/suselinux-adminguide/html/ch17s03.html https://www.novell.com/documentation/suse91/suselinux-adming... It only emulated Netware 2/3, not the later NDS versions.
- timbit42 4y ago
  What would be the benefit of porting IPX/SPX to Unix? Netware already ran on TCP/IP.
wslh 4y ago
If I remember well this is the story that repeats every time with Microsoft: Novell was the king in the initial phase of networking in companies then Microsoft included the functionality in a modern operating system, network growths, and their sales force was greater than Novell one. Corollary: Microsoft sells s**t such as Teams. We are too biased to technology that forgot the power of strong businesses.
andrewstuart 4y ago
Novell wouldn’t, or couldn’t, make Netware use task preemption and memory protection. It’s a startling deficiency that killed its chances of becoming a general purpose server. Without these things, the Netware server couldn’t be trusted to run independent applications. There were some third party server applications built for Netware, I think maybe CC:mail server and Lotus Notes, but the memory protection and cooperative multitasking meant they didn’t last long. I don’t know if this is true but I heard it was Drew Major who made this call, which IMO killed Netware. The justification I heard at the time was that memory protection was too slow. Better slow than dead. I think Novell just didn’t have the technical chops to do it. Also Microsoft was at the height of its powers as a competition killing machine and nothing that stood in its way survived. It really genuinely looked back then like Microsoft was going to wipe out everything and it would be a Microsoft only future. Novell was no exception along with Lotus and Borland and many others.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Desqview had that more or less solved, I wonder why Novell couldn't.
  - mike_hearn 4y ago
    Probably compatibility? Protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking were a notoriously difficult transition. Apple never managed it with classic macOS, and scars from the transition are visible all over the Windows API even decades later.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      I can see why Apple couldn't do it, the MMU on the Mac wasn't up to the task but on the PC anything post 386 was more than up for it from a technical perspective. Even the 286 machines could do it very well (QnX was originally built on a 16 bit platform).
      - rwmj 4y ago
        Even the awkward segmentation on 8086 was arguably a form of memory protection. Minix on 8086 was surprisingly robust in practice (obviously not in theory) as a rogue 'near' pointer would usually only corrupt the current program. But on the original topic, yes once you've got a 286+ there's no excuse for your OS not having true memory protection.
manishsharan 4y ago
Developing NLMs for Novell Netware was my first job and here is my take: I think Novell lost its focus and the other market factors also played a role. Novell's decline started when they also tried to compete with Microsoft for Wordprocessor market. Novell's then CEO became obsessed with beating Microsoft at everything . And also the Netware Directory services began losing to Active Directory as Windows 98 shipped with AD client built into it where as one had to manually install NDS clients on Windows. It was simply easier to manage your Windows deployments with AD than NDS. Moreover, IBM throwing in the towel with OS/2 ceded the desktop market to Microsoft Windows AD became the natural solution for managing and administering those desktops.
- merlyn 4y ago
  Novell users at the time 4.0 came out had no clue what a Directory was, and why they should use it. They were quite used to v3.11, and everybody turned their back on v4.0 as too complex, totally unneeded, and why bother. By the time Microsoft AD came around, there were actual uses for Microsoft AD, and plenty of buy-in.
  - tssva 4y ago
    I had several customers that ran large NDS instances covering 10s of thousands of users distributed globally.
    - xen2xen1 4y ago
      Did NDS ever have the equivalent of Windows 2000 Group Policy? And when, if so? Any discussion of dominance of Windows Sever that doesn't mention GPOs is missing the layer that finished off anything competing. Very that's in GP on server 2022 wasn't in Win2k, outside of controlling features as they were added.
      - tssva 4y ago
        The war against Novell was basically already won by the time group policy was introduced. That being said Novell introduced Novell Application Launcher in 1996 which had some of the features of group policy. Novell introduced ZENworks in 1998 which would have been much more of a competitor to GPO.
efitz 4y ago
NDS was overkill for what was effectively a departmental file and print server. NetWare failed to innovate as an application server platform - NT had a much richer API. NT was also viewed as much more easy to administer. This was a double edged sword as many people at the time didn’t (or wouldn’t) acknowledge it as a serious server platform due to having a GUI. Also it enabled many people to run servers who had no business running servers (tubes screensaver anyone?) Finally Novell was really late grokking the internet. I remember running early NetWare 4.0x and trying to configure TCP/IP and having to configure IP addresses as dotted HEX quads. At that point I mentally flipped the bozo bit on them.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Pretty much. Basically they could never recapture the NetWare magic. This is something I wrote in the early 2000s when they were making another (and pretty much last) attempt with SUSE. http://bitmasons.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/pubs/novellsuse.pdf http://bitmasons.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/pubs...
- bluedino 4y ago
  I worked at a team blue and team red shop, NDS was amazing compared to AD.
  - efitz 4y ago
    The Microsoft code name for services for NetWare was “Visine” because “it gets the red out”.
    - lukeh 4y ago
      Novell also had a similar sense of humour with the original codename for DSfW.
- lukeh 4y ago
  Around 2006-7 we added an Active Directory personality to NDS, called Domain Services for Windows. It was an interesting piece of engineering that highlighted both the similarities and differences between the two technologies. (Note that it ran on OES Linux only, not NetWare.)
vsareto 4y ago
All I remember about Novell is that you could install games on a school network locally, but often couldn't launch them. That was okay because adding a link in Powerpoint to an EXE which would then be executed because Powerpoint could.
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mleo 4y ago
Back in university days, I worked for a small department that had NetWare 3 Server. It was mostly used for printer sharing and email, using Pegasus Mail as the the client. I mostly remember a separate PC that ran Charon gateway to bridge the TCP/IP SMTP divide to provide larger Internet mail relay. The educational pricing for NetWare 4 wasn’t too bad and spent one summer planning and upgrading to it. Since it was small department it wasn’t too bad to administer, but could see the writing on the wall about the difficulties dealing with NDS clients on Windows and Mac workstations. Don’t know what happened to the systems after graduation, but assume some of it was eventually consolidated due to security. All the desktops and servers had direct Internet connections and were not NAT’d nor had hardware firewall. That could not have lasted too many more years in the late 90’s.
themadturk 4y ago
My first job in IT was implementing a NetWare 3.0 environment for a law firm. Eventually we used their distributed office system to network between three branches using modems to move shared documents and email once an hour. When I moved to another law firm a few years later, with a mature NetWare system in place, I evaluated and tested Windows 95 and saw the effort Microsoft put into making sure NetWare networking worked well in the new system...NT was a thing then, but they knew NetWare was the dominant enterprise networking system.
- Neil44 4y ago
  I remember there being a Microsoft netware client right up to XP, not sure about 7 as most customers got rid of their netware by then.
AlbertCory 4y ago
Some nits first: > Using a file server meant that PCs could share data with one another, for example permitting the first network-aware PC program of any kind – Novell’s network game SNIPES Utter garbage. He didn't even say "first game" which would have been tougher. "first network-aware PC program" ?? get real. > Novell’s proprietary IPX/SPX protocol Which were Xerox's XNS protocols in all but name. > TCP/IP – or Internet Protocol as we used to call it No, we called it "TCP" LAN Manager was a "joint effort" with 3Com (where I was). It was a stunningly bad deal for 3Com and we hated Microsoft at the time. It was Gates' first attempt to defeat Novell, and it failed at that. All the same, Novell wiped the floor with 3Com in the 80s. Their stuff ran on every LAN hardware and ours, of course, only ran on Ethernet.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  second this - I saw TCP/IP protocol running alongside other network protocols on Ethernet cables at that time. There was fierce business competition already; the technical media usually parroted the marketing leads from the various companies. Within technical academia (ivory tower) and close dot-mil (ARPA) they didn't make much of a public msg, so Byte Magazine readers didn't hear that terminology. Here in California, I never heard anyone say "Internet Protocol" in those days, not once.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    everything was a TLA then.
- lproven 4y ago
  Hi. Article author here. Re Snipes: I know of no earlier network-native app for the DOS PC. It's described on Wikipedia as "Snipes [aka 'NSnipes' for 'Network Snipes'] is the first network application ever written for a commercial personal computer" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWare A citation: https://web.archive.org/web/20160728221417/http://www.textmodegames.com/download/snipes.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160728221417/http://www.textmo... If you have a pointer to anything earlier, I'd welcome it, but after all this time I doubt my editors will change the article. :-) IPX/SPX was indeed based on XNS, as was Banyan's version, but it wasn't compatible with it. IPX was, I suspect, vastly more widely used than any other flavour of XNS ever. > No, we called it "TCP" Hey, it's a big planet, you know. You used 3 of the 5 letters, some others used the other 2 letters, or to make it easier, the words they stood for.
smm11 4y ago
I was at a Netware place where a lot of us used System 7 then OS 8 Macs, and the in-house Solaris webserver was actually where a lot of our network files were since the Novell "client" was a little weird on early Macs. We stuck early OSX on soemthing, went to Network, and a few heads exploded.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  early OSX being NeXTStep, not A/UX I would think.. all of this was very early days
yalogin 4y ago
Novell and NetWare to me is an illustration of how tough it is to kill companies. Even today they get upwards of 500 million on NetWare revenue. We, in the tech field, are scored about new tech but it’s a great thing to see that most people look at tech as a tool, if it works why bother touching it? NetWare, works and works very well for a given task.
bluedino 4y ago
Everything else on the network ran Windows. A windows power user could sort-of admin a Windows network, it was easy. All the applications ran on Windows since VB, Access, and Foxpro made it easy for people to build stuff. It's that simple. NT being an insecure, slow system that required a reboot every month didn't prevent it from taking over. And ten years later, Microsoft made most of those things better (but didn't fix them anywhere close to 100%)
Jemm 4y ago
I was team Lantastic. Still have the swag.
deleted 4y ago
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knuckleheadsmif 4y ago
I worked for Apple porting Netware to the first PowerPC machines for an Apple server code named that was released with AIX running on it. The Netware project was cancelled as it was about to enter Beta as both companies were hitting hard times. This was in the last days of Spindler’s reign. The only thing Netware had to their advantage was a network of CNEs that made lots of money setting up and maintaining systems. But for small companies it was very expensive and large companies unnecessary as they had internal staffs that were not interested in another OS they had to train staff on. It also made them dependent upon 3rd parties to sell their systems and while it worked for awhile they in the long term will never be loyal. The fact that the company lived so long on protocols ripped off from Xerox (they use to point people to Xerox documentation) is a mystery.
- knuckleheadsmif 4y ago
  Here is a blog about the unique Apple server and Netware http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2021/10/shiner-esb-apple-network-server.html http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2021/10/shiner-esb-apple-network-...
- knuckleheadsmif 4y ago
  The modifications Novel made to the XNS protocols for the most part very minor.
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vondur 4y ago
Netware was far more expensive than NT server. Most smaller businesses couldn’t afford or needed directory services that Novell offered. Add in the fact that once NT 4 came out with easier to use GUI tools, Netware was done. Their product was stable, we had 2 big computer labs and printers running off one server It never crashed. I remember having to restart a print queue every so often though.
WalterBright 4y ago
I remember Netware. Not that I used it myself, this is what I heard from others. Everyone used Netware because they had to. Everybody hated it. I never heard a nice thing said about it. When another, better, networking solution arrived, that was the end of Novell. I learned to never invest in a company whose products people use only because they had to. They're doomed. Invest in companies where people love the products. P.S. really bad investments are companies that like to sue their customers.
- taskforcegemini 4y ago
  I have never heard anything good about SAP from people that had to use it

106 points by lproven 4y ago

I was a CNE back in the 3.11 days and Microsoft was giving me training and cert vouchers. Novel made me pay a ton to keep my certs. I eventually went Windows.

vhold 4y ago

This article from 1993 has the most important detail missing from the Register article: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1993/08/09/78175/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1993... > The NetWare operating system installed on the server computer acts as a traffic cop, masterminding the flow of information over a network. (The latest version costs $4,695 for 25 users, $47,995 for 1,000.)

jon-wood 4y ago
I’m not convinced that was much of a reason. Windows NT 4 Server pricing was similar, with licenses needed for each client connecting, plus additional licensing for the OS running on those clients.
- EvanAnderson 4y ago
  I was deploying a lot of small office networks in the late 90s. I found NT 3.51 and 4.0 a ton easier to purchase for Customers (i.e. the company I worked for needed a much looser “partnership” arrangement with Microsoft vs. Novell). NT was definitely cheaper, too. That made a difference in small deployments where I was often getting nickel-and-dimed.
- merlyn 4y ago
  I think licensing was a huge factor in Microsoft winning. Microsoft's license was soft, and depending on the customer buying enough paper to cover, if you could even find a reseller that could describe how to properly license Windows Server (exteremely doubtful). OOTH, Novell's licensing was a hard limit. Once that # of workstations logged in, those without a license were hosed. On all the jobs I did in those days, Novell networks at each customer site _never_ had enough licenses to cover every workstation. There was always somebody left out and they had to go bug people to see if they were done with the network so they could get in their tasks. Nobody ever seemed to overprovision their licenses to cover every single workstation (or even to have extra). I never met a company using Microsoft server that properly had their CALs licensed, and they didn't want to hear it from me. Finding somebody to sell you the proper CALs was an interesting exercise. Most other network server OSes at the time (the Unix vendors were trying hard in this space in those early days too) also had hard licenses. Which was part of why they didn't gain traction at all.
  - EvanAnderson 4y ago
    MSFT licensing being “soft” with enforcement has always seemed like a major strategic advantage for them.
    - TillE 4y ago
      They got serious about license activation in the Windows Vista - Windows 7 era, but now they're back to where anyone can install a Windows license of their choice with just a few commands, using a pirate KMS server.
      - Karunamon 4y ago
        The cynical take on this is that Microsoft has pivoted hard into being a services and advertising company, so it is more important to them that you run Windows with all of its data gathering and advertising and cloud BS then it is that you paid for Windows at all. They could easily break the fake KMS but choose not to. It speaks a lot to their priorities.
        robotnikman 4y ago
        That's what I figured as well. To Microsoft right now, more devices running windows = more data gathered, regardless of whether the device was activated by a pirated KMS server or not.
        DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
        LTSB/LTSC doesn't have the anything like the levels of telemetry in the Home SKUs, but even so, as a (former) MSFT SE I can give you my personal assurances that the telemtry is about seeing how the product is used and not for marketing/money-making reasons (beyond, ostensibly, making the product better to entice people to pay for upgrades or subscription services).
        robotnikman 4y ago
- tssva 4y ago
  The pricing quote is from 1993 when Windows NT 3.1 was released. A Windows NT 3.1 server license cost $1500 and didn't require client access licensing. Many of my clients jumped ship from Netware because of the huge price difference. Almost all of them were pissed when NT 3.5 was released and required client access licensing but having just finished migrating off Netware they weren't going to migrate back.
Genbox 4y ago
For everyone else wondering. Prices adjusted for inflation: $4,695 in 1993 is worth $9,682 today. $47,995 is worth $98,982 today

lifeisstillgood 4y ago

Even today when I hear "Network Operating System" I cannot grok what on earth it is supposed to mean. Back in the day when I was trying to understand how to setup these horrors, I remember thinking I was missing something that would magically "work on the network" (at some lower OSI level) not "a server that sent things over the network" If we are talking confusions that killed netware, my money is on marketing "network operating system" as opposed to "buy microsoft NT on your server to run your network"

jacquesm 4y ago
Well, Sun did it under 'the network is the computer' so they weren't exactly alone in that. And that story didn't quite have a happy ending either. It think the single biggest factors was the Microsoft was so dominant on the desktop that they had a really strong advantage to beat Novell at their own game with NT as a server operating system. That made it 'single source supplier' which is worth gold to any IT director that doesn't want to get caught in the middle between two parties pointing at each other when things don't work.
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  There is another comment here basically saying "Microsoft was on a serious roll and nothing stood up to them". It's probably the best explanation when so many factors might explain different facets, if you aggregate everything then in the end the favourite to win is the one to bet on.
starik36 4y ago
That's exactly it. It was confusing to me as well, still is. Netware basically provided networking and login services - something that Windows NT basically threw in as a "feature" on top of it being a general purpose OS. Netware's demise was a matter of time. I am reading other comments here stating that it was the lack of preemptive multitasking that doomed it. Not even close. Netware was a feature mascarading as an OS.

rzzzt 4y ago

I remember one benchmark that made some waves around 1998-1999: - http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/nts4nw5filesvr.html http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/nts4nw5filesvr.html - http://web.archive.org/web/19990220215149/http://www.novell.com/advantage/nw5/nw5-mindcraftcheck.html http://web.archive.org/web/19990220215149/http://www.novell.... - http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/response-novell-nts4nw5filesvr.html http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/response-novell-nts4nw5...

turbobooster 4y ago

An old friend told me years ago Eric Schmidt was what ruined Novell. Do other people believe that?

manishsharan 4y ago
No. It was Ray Noorda's obsession with beating Microsoft and diversifying their focus that was the root cause , in my opinion. However, it was also Ray that led Novell to its glorious heights.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Eric Schmidt ultimately failed to revitalize them in spite of best efforts. But Noorda and Bob Frankenberg have to share at least some of the blame as well--as does a whole lot of internal politics. Novell basically managed to go essentially nowhere through the 1990s while Windows NT was maturing.
jacquesm 4y ago
I don't know. I really don't like Schmidt, I think he's one of the biggest hypocrites alive but Novell was arguably already on the way out when he took over. Noorda made it go up, and he saw the beginnings of it going back down and that's when Schmidt was hired, probably in an attempt to turn the tide and avoid the inevitable victory of Microsoft over Novell. But Microsoft really had an unfair advantage and personally I do not think Novell ever had a realistic chance of staying in the race in the longer term.
- ido 4y ago
  Why is Eric Schmidt one of the biggest hypocrites alive?
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Because he said that we should all just get used to not having privacy any more but when a publication listed the things they found out about Schmidt he said that it should have never been printed.

nobody9999 4y ago

I thought then and still say that had Novell ported IPX/SPX to Unix[0] (they did own Unix in the 90s), Microsoft would never have been able to make them irrelevant. Because the biggest reason Netware lost was the inability to develop software on the platform. This severely limited the value of Netware as a server operating system, as developers (for the most part) prefer to develop on the the platform (cross-compiling for other flavors of *nix doesn't count) for which they're developing software. What's more, IIUC, the development tools for Netware were just awful. Which additionally limited the number of developers working on Netware-related applications. And even those few folks mostly abandoned it as NT gained popularity as a server and a development platform. Had there been a robust user/development environment (like Unix), that likely wouldn't have happened. [0] I am aware that Netware was mostly written in x86 assembler, but porting IPX/SPX and a few other bits and bobs would have allowed Novell to migrate to a Unix platform without having to rewrite the entire OS.

nradov 4y ago
Novell actually did port NetWare networking services to Unix in 2005 but by that point it was too late.
- opless 4y ago
  It was available for a handful of Unix OS in the mid 90s There was also a FOSS NetWare server for Linux at the same time too
  - lproven 4y ago
    It was called MARSNWE, if anyone is curious. A source, ironically from Novell docs. https://www.novell.com/documentation/suse91/suselinux-adminguide/html/ch17s03.html https://www.novell.com/documentation/suse91/suselinux-adming... It only emulated Netware 2/3, not the later NDS versions.
timbit42 4y ago
What would be the benefit of porting IPX/SPX to Unix? Netware already ran on TCP/IP.

wslh 4y ago

If I remember well this is the story that repeats every time with Microsoft: Novell was the king in the initial phase of networking in companies then Microsoft included the functionality in a modern operating system, network growths, and their sales force was greater than Novell one. Corollary: Microsoft sells s**t such as Teams. We are too biased to technology that forgot the power of strong businesses.

andrewstuart 4y ago

Novell wouldn’t, or couldn’t, make Netware use task preemption and memory protection. It’s a startling deficiency that killed its chances of becoming a general purpose server. Without these things, the Netware server couldn’t be trusted to run independent applications. There were some third party server applications built for Netware, I think maybe CC:mail server and Lotus Notes, but the memory protection and cooperative multitasking meant they didn’t last long. I don’t know if this is true but I heard it was Drew Major who made this call, which IMO killed Netware. The justification I heard at the time was that memory protection was too slow. Better slow than dead. I think Novell just didn’t have the technical chops to do it. Also Microsoft was at the height of its powers as a competition killing machine and nothing that stood in its way survived. It really genuinely looked back then like Microsoft was going to wipe out everything and it would be a Microsoft only future. Novell was no exception along with Lotus and Borland and many others.

jacquesm 4y ago
Desqview had that more or less solved, I wonder why Novell couldn't.
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  Probably compatibility? Protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking were a notoriously difficult transition. Apple never managed it with classic macOS, and scars from the transition are visible all over the Windows API even decades later.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    I can see why Apple couldn't do it, the MMU on the Mac wasn't up to the task but on the PC anything post 386 was more than up for it from a technical perspective. Even the 286 machines could do it very well (QnX was originally built on a 16 bit platform).
    - rwmj 4y ago
      Even the awkward segmentation on 8086 was arguably a form of memory protection. Minix on 8086 was surprisingly robust in practice (obviously not in theory) as a rogue 'near' pointer would usually only corrupt the current program. But on the original topic, yes once you've got a 286+ there's no excuse for your OS not having true memory protection.

manishsharan 4y ago

Developing NLMs for Novell Netware was my first job and here is my take: I think Novell lost its focus and the other market factors also played a role. Novell's decline started when they also tried to compete with Microsoft for Wordprocessor market. Novell's then CEO became obsessed with beating Microsoft at everything . And also the Netware Directory services began losing to Active Directory as Windows 98 shipped with AD client built into it where as one had to manually install NDS clients on Windows. It was simply easier to manage your Windows deployments with AD than NDS. Moreover, IBM throwing in the towel with OS/2 ceded the desktop market to Microsoft Windows AD became the natural solution for managing and administering those desktops.

merlyn 4y ago
Novell users at the time 4.0 came out had no clue what a Directory was, and why they should use it. They were quite used to v3.11, and everybody turned their back on v4.0 as too complex, totally unneeded, and why bother. By the time Microsoft AD came around, there were actual uses for Microsoft AD, and plenty of buy-in.
- tssva 4y ago
  I had several customers that ran large NDS instances covering 10s of thousands of users distributed globally.
  - xen2xen1 4y ago
    Did NDS ever have the equivalent of Windows 2000 Group Policy? And when, if so? Any discussion of dominance of Windows Sever that doesn't mention GPOs is missing the layer that finished off anything competing. Very that's in GP on server 2022 wasn't in Win2k, outside of controlling features as they were added.
    - tssva 4y ago
      The war against Novell was basically already won by the time group policy was introduced. That being said Novell introduced Novell Application Launcher in 1996 which had some of the features of group policy. Novell introduced ZENworks in 1998 which would have been much more of a competitor to GPO.

efitz 4y ago

NDS was overkill for what was effectively a departmental file and print server. NetWare failed to innovate as an application server platform - NT had a much richer API. NT was also viewed as much more easy to administer. This was a double edged sword as many people at the time didn’t (or wouldn’t) acknowledge it as a serious server platform due to having a GUI. Also it enabled many people to run servers who had no business running servers (tubes screensaver anyone?) Finally Novell was really late grokking the internet. I remember running early NetWare 4.0x and trying to configure TCP/IP and having to configure IP addresses as dotted HEX quads. At that point I mentally flipped the bozo bit on them.

ghaff 4y ago
Pretty much. Basically they could never recapture the NetWare magic. This is something I wrote in the early 2000s when they were making another (and pretty much last) attempt with SUSE. http://bitmasons.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/pubs/novellsuse.pdf http://bitmasons.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/pubs...
bluedino 4y ago
I worked at a team blue and team red shop, NDS was amazing compared to AD.
- efitz 4y ago
  The Microsoft code name for services for NetWare was “Visine” because “it gets the red out”.
  - lukeh 4y ago
    Novell also had a similar sense of humour with the original codename for DSfW.
lukeh 4y ago
Around 2006-7 we added an Active Directory personality to NDS, called Domain Services for Windows. It was an interesting piece of engineering that highlighted both the similarities and differences between the two technologies. (Note that it ran on OES Linux only, not NetWare.)

vsareto 4y ago

All I remember about Novell is that you could install games on a school network locally, but often couldn't launch them. That was okay because adding a link in Powerpoint to an EXE which would then be executed because Powerpoint could.

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mleo 4y ago

Back in university days, I worked for a small department that had NetWare 3 Server. It was mostly used for printer sharing and email, using Pegasus Mail as the the client. I mostly remember a separate PC that ran Charon gateway to bridge the TCP/IP SMTP divide to provide larger Internet mail relay. The educational pricing for NetWare 4 wasn’t too bad and spent one summer planning and upgrading to it. Since it was small department it wasn’t too bad to administer, but could see the writing on the wall about the difficulties dealing with NDS clients on Windows and Mac workstations. Don’t know what happened to the systems after graduation, but assume some of it was eventually consolidated due to security. All the desktops and servers had direct Internet connections and were not NAT’d nor had hardware firewall. That could not have lasted too many more years in the late 90’s.

themadturk 4y ago

My first job in IT was implementing a NetWare 3.0 environment for a law firm. Eventually we used their distributed office system to network between three branches using modems to move shared documents and email once an hour. When I moved to another law firm a few years later, with a mature NetWare system in place, I evaluated and tested Windows 95 and saw the effort Microsoft put into making sure NetWare networking worked well in the new system...NT was a thing then, but they knew NetWare was the dominant enterprise networking system.

Neil44 4y ago
I remember there being a Microsoft netware client right up to XP, not sure about 7 as most customers got rid of their netware by then.

AlbertCory 4y ago

Some nits first: > Using a file server meant that PCs could share data with one another, for example permitting the first network-aware PC program of any kind – Novell’s network game SNIPES Utter garbage. He didn't even say "first game" which would have been tougher. "first network-aware PC program" ?? get real. > Novell’s proprietary IPX/SPX protocol Which were Xerox's XNS protocols in all but name. > TCP/IP – or Internet Protocol as we used to call it No, we called it "TCP" LAN Manager was a "joint effort" with 3Com (where I was). It was a stunningly bad deal for 3Com and we hated Microsoft at the time. It was Gates' first attempt to defeat Novell, and it failed at that. All the same, Novell wiped the floor with 3Com in the 80s. Their stuff ran on every LAN hardware and ours, of course, only ran on Ethernet.

mistrial9 4y ago
second this - I saw TCP/IP protocol running alongside other network protocols on Ethernet cables at that time. There was fierce business competition already; the technical media usually parroted the marketing leads from the various companies. Within technical academia (ivory tower) and close dot-mil (ARPA) they didn't make much of a public msg, so Byte Magazine readers didn't hear that terminology. Here in California, I never heard anyone say "Internet Protocol" in those days, not once.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  everything was a TLA then.
lproven 4y ago
Hi. Article author here. Re Snipes: I know of no earlier network-native app for the DOS PC. It's described on Wikipedia as "Snipes [aka 'NSnipes' for 'Network Snipes'] is the first network application ever written for a commercial personal computer" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWare A citation: https://web.archive.org/web/20160728221417/http://www.textmodegames.com/download/snipes.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160728221417/http://www.textmo... If you have a pointer to anything earlier, I'd welcome it, but after all this time I doubt my editors will change the article. :-) IPX/SPX was indeed based on XNS, as was Banyan's version, but it wasn't compatible with it. IPX was, I suspect, vastly more widely used than any other flavour of XNS ever. > No, we called it "TCP" Hey, it's a big planet, you know. You used 3 of the 5 letters, some others used the other 2 letters, or to make it easier, the words they stood for.

smm11 4y ago

I was at a Netware place where a lot of us used System 7 then OS 8 Macs, and the in-house Solaris webserver was actually where a lot of our network files were since the Novell "client" was a little weird on early Macs. We stuck early OSX on soemthing, went to Network, and a few heads exploded.

mistrial9 4y ago
early OSX being NeXTStep, not A/UX I would think.. all of this was very early days

yalogin 4y ago

Novell and NetWare to me is an illustration of how tough it is to kill companies. Even today they get upwards of 500 million on NetWare revenue. We, in the tech field, are scored about new tech but it’s a great thing to see that most people look at tech as a tool, if it works why bother touching it? NetWare, works and works very well for a given task.

bluedino 4y ago

Everything else on the network ran Windows. A windows power user could sort-of admin a Windows network, it was easy. All the applications ran on Windows since VB, Access, and Foxpro made it easy for people to build stuff. It's that simple. NT being an insecure, slow system that required a reboot every month didn't prevent it from taking over. And ten years later, Microsoft made most of those things better (but didn't fix them anywhere close to 100%)

Jemm 4y ago

I was team Lantastic. Still have the swag.

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knuckleheadsmif 4y ago

I worked for Apple porting Netware to the first PowerPC machines for an Apple server code named that was released with AIX running on it. The Netware project was cancelled as it was about to enter Beta as both companies were hitting hard times. This was in the last days of Spindler’s reign. The only thing Netware had to their advantage was a network of CNEs that made lots of money setting up and maintaining systems. But for small companies it was very expensive and large companies unnecessary as they had internal staffs that were not interested in another OS they had to train staff on. It also made them dependent upon 3rd parties to sell their systems and while it worked for awhile they in the long term will never be loyal. The fact that the company lived so long on protocols ripped off from Xerox (they use to point people to Xerox documentation) is a mystery.

knuckleheadsmif 4y ago
Here is a blog about the unique Apple server and Netware http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2021/10/shiner-esb-apple-network-server.html http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2021/10/shiner-esb-apple-network-...
knuckleheadsmif 4y ago
The modifications Novel made to the XNS protocols for the most part very minor.

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vondur 4y ago

Netware was far more expensive than NT server. Most smaller businesses couldn’t afford or needed directory services that Novell offered. Add in the fact that once NT 4 came out with easier to use GUI tools, Netware was done. Their product was stable, we had 2 big computer labs and printers running off one server It never crashed. I remember having to restart a print queue every so often though.

WalterBright 4y ago

I remember Netware. Not that I used it myself, this is what I heard from others. Everyone used Netware because they had to. Everybody hated it. I never heard a nice thing said about it. When another, better, networking solution arrived, that was the end of Novell. I learned to never invest in a company whose products people use only because they had to. They're doomed. Invest in companies where people love the products. P.S. really bad investments are companies that like to sue their customers.

taskforcegemini 4y ago
I have never heard anything good about SAP from people that had to use it