4 ms·
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'
by 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 agoNovell 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 agoI had several customers that ran large NDS instances covering 10s of thousands of users distributed globally.
- xen2xen1 4y agoDid 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 agoThe 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.
- Neil44 4y agoWhen Microsoft went from simple domains to AD around 2000 they really streaked ahead on the management side. Novell did have something comparable - was it called Zen or something - and it looked decent but Novell just didn’t have the numbers.