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Microsoft Claims 3.3 million NetWare Migration Win
Anonymous Coward writes "For the second year in a row, Microsoft has waited for Novell's annual BrainShare show to start before claiming a huge customer migration win off NetWare and onto Windows. According to this article Microsoft says that there were more than 1.8 million successful commercial sector migrations in 2005 alone, and a total of 3.3 million customers migrated over the past two years. It has also launched a new program to lure customers in the education and state and local government sectors off NetWare and onto Windows." Novell's comments are enlightening about where they see themselves within the market.
Netware is missing a few branches off it's tree!
-Sj53
And in other news today: Apple smuggly announced that the iPod is greatly outselling 8-track tape players.
I'm Novell certified and have (had) been admining Netware boxes for over a decade. But I haven't touched one in more than three years. NDS is worlds better than Active Directory, especially in a true enterprise-sized installation. However, the supposed debate is moot in 2006. Netware got clobbered like Netscape Navigator did. Too many software vendors have stopped writing versions of their products for Netware, and too many hardware vendors don't write drivers. I commend Novell for trying to turn their ship around and not resigning themselves to annilation. Their committment to SuSE is a very wise move, IMHO. So enough with the marketdroid strutting already. This hasn't been news since the last century.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
FTA: Asked where Microsoft had gotten those specific numbers, Gavin said they represented the number of "successful migrations completed in partnership with Quest Software in 2005," but he was unable to immediately provide eWEEK with information on whether these numbers represented individual customers or total users or what versions of NetWare they were running. Half of these users were probably running DOS-based NetWare, and were due for ANY kind of an upgrade; they took what was cheapest. This isn't news.
This really illustrates how greedy Microsoft is. NetWare specializes in one little segment of the market. It's not enough that MS's crappy OS is on most of the computers around the world, they have to infect the market segment that Novell is currently parasitising.
It not only shows how greedy they are, but also how they are just plain bullies. Timing these claims the way they did is just dirty. I know this is just business, but the claim is hard to justify:
Asked where Microsoft had gotten those specific numbers, Gavin said they represented the number of "successful migrations completed in partnership with Quest Software in 2005," but he was unable to immediately provide eWEEK with information on whether these numbers represented individual customers or total users or what versions of NetWare they were running.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
The first one of you Windows 2000 babies to say "What's Netware?" gets smacked with my walker.
Novell sees themselves as dead. Because that's where they are. They won the war on the technical front and got handed their asses on the marketing front. At the end of the day the marketing front is (usually) more powerful. That means game over for Novell.
these customers are choosing to upgrade to Windows, rather then follow Netware's recomended upgrade path (linux)
I remember back in the day when Netware ruled the roost. IBM PC LAN was basically a joke and no corp in their right mind actually used it for anything real. Then Lan Manager came out and the writing was on the wall, the "file server as a black box" days were coming to an end. To Novell's credit they did try to roll with the punches, but in the end it was too little to late. RIP Netware.
In other news water is wet, fire is hot and rocks are hard. Our sources predict that soon Microoft will trash linux, stay tuned....
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
That's like Redhat claiming that 12 million DOS users have switched to Linux.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Novell didn't even have the recommended upgrade path in place until netware's fate was already sealed. Hell, I'm not sure we could honestly say the linux upgrade path for netware is in place *yet*. IMHO they still have a ways to go before Novell can say their linux products "replace" their old netware products.
SUSE isn't Novell's way of saving their product line. The product line already got clobbered, and everyone knows it-- SUSE is the way of saving the company, and maybe claiming some of their product line back.
This is not the first time that Microsoft has released figures for migration off Novell's NetWare and onto Windows during BrainShare, with the apparent goal of diverting attention away from Novell's conference news.
Brainshare, has that become something akin to the Collective?
The Collective
Microsoft is a vast collective of humanoids that have been assimilated by the Billgatus of Borg. These humanoids, called Windrones, have various ID badges outside their bodies. These ID badges connect all the Windrones to each other in a massive collective called Redmond, which supresses each Windrone's individuality. Windrones have the ability to adapt to enemy software which makes them a powerful enemy. Their main goal is to find profits by assimilating more workers and technology, but they only assimilate what they think is relevant market or technological traits. The Windrones are un-emotional but efficient and can only grow in numbers by assimilation.
The traditional Windrone hail which is delivered before the assimilation is as follows:
"We are Microsoft. You will be assimilated. Your technical and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile."
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
*ahem* How is it flamebait to explain to someone that capitalism leads to a certain set of common business practices? At least I wasn't marked troll, for once. If anything, the comment I replied to should have been modded flamebait, since it made (or implied) the statement that Microsoft is evil and Novell is holy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
GET A REAL JOB! ^__^ Sorry, but seriously, I find this sort of mental masturbation by MS and company to be silly. If they can't find a good point to promote their products then maybe I can steer clear of theirs. :)
-- Bridget
Check out privoxy.org (kick ass proxy server and filter) and adblock.mozdev.org.
How many migrations from:
Windows 95?
Windows 98?
Windows NT 3.5?
Windows NT 3.51?
Windows NT 4.0?
Windows 2000?
Citrix Winframe?
Citrix Metaframe?
Citrix Metaframe XP? (really, what kind of bs name extension is this?)
Citrix NetScaler?
Inquiring minds want to know
"Oops, there goes another customer."
Reply: "Yeah, but we are better....."
"And another...."
Reply: "Yeah, but they suck"
"There goes another......."
Is it trolling to suggest Novell needs a new argument. If "we're still better" aint stopping migration, might a change of message be in order?
If you run ancient clipper-applications w/o source -and thus no way to migrate them in 1 or 2 mouseclicks- which use DBX-databases-ervers as the company I work for use, you'd better stick to Netware, connecting to databases using IPX/SPX is soooo much faster than windows.
;)
Now we have moved to an AD (yuck) things slowed down dramatically, and there is no way to improve it, because MS fsked up the protocol...
Rumours go ppl@redmond did that on purpose when the Netware/Windows war _really_ was going on (ages ago) to show their clients how fsked up that protocol was and they'd better use MS TCP/IP and stuff.
But remember, it's just a rumour
Damnit Jim, I'm [root@localhost w00t]#, not an AD-Adminstrator(tm) !
Our company is on its way of moving out all our Netware servers and moving to a completely MS based environment. Sad to see us go that way. I have said my piece over and over but to no avail. Now all I can still fight for is Oracle on Unix vs MS SQL. We ever go that way I am going to have to update my resume. Our computer room is a nightmare with a bazallion Dell servers all running MS something or other...
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Well, the network at my school uses NetWare and Novell, and I haven't had too many problems with it thus far. Of course, I'll probably have to switch to Microsoft once I graduate, but I don't see what advantages Microsoft has over Novell.
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
How many users has Microsoft lost to Samba?
Oh please,
regardless of microsofties claims to the contrary, Novell Netware is alive and doing fine, I have no problems selling a Netware server installation when I can simply take the prospective customer on a tour of one of my customers that is using a Novell server.
They hear things like 700+ day uptimes (and running) without reboots or dataloss, weekly patches or problems of any kind. They talk to sysadmins that actually get 99.9999% uptimes without multiple servers and a single admin able to handle the server AND end user needs w Zenworks & the other products from Novell and the MS marketing becomes just that, marketing.
There's a reason that 90+% of the Fortune 500 still uses Novell, perhaps it's because companies with real IT departments make choices based on technology instead of marketing.
Also, If I remember correctly part of MSs claim for having so may servers is based on the fact that even USER pc's are being counted as servers because the default install gives out access to the "administrative shares" making ALL MS machines servers.
As far as software support, you would have to explicitly code against working with the Novell client before you could say it was "unsupported" due to the lengths that Novell has to go to be completely compatible with MS windows.
The required drivers for any server hardware are better made by Novell than the hardware vendor anyway. Giving ring 0 access to any old random hardware vendor's code is a good part of MS's problem, even now.
Note a related story at The Register: "Novell puts Netware on life support until 2015" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/21/novell_bra inshare/
I work in a Novell shop. I'm a Windows sysadmin. My preference is for Windows, so I'm looking at this from that point of view - and I'll admit I'm biased towards Windows.
Novell QA went right down the crapper in recent versions. Netware would crash multiple times per day when it was first set up (we moved from Banyan Vines) - it took years of patches from Novell to get it to any semblence of stability. The Novell client often breaks things with each new version - and it's a pain to instruct new users on the difference between a local (Windows) login and their Netware login.
While NDS is great, the management tools for it absolutely suck. Novell went schizophrenic on the management tools - you have iManage, NWAdmin, and ConsoneOne, all of which can do some things but not everything, so you need 3 management tools just to manage Netware.
Groupwise is absolutely hideous - the client is unintuitive and fell out of the ugly tree. Things which are easy to do in Outlook are a chore to do in Groupwise. Oh, and Groupwise didn't even have a flag in the client to indicate if you had replied or forwarded a message until ~2 years ago - I'd have to go searching through my Sent mail to figure out if I had replied to a message.
Novell fumbled, and Microsoft picked up the ball - Microsoft went out there with excellent marketing, developer support (including hardware/device driver support), and incentives to switch. Microsoft didn't get it right with their first versions (Windows NT 3 anyone?), but they kept at it and kept improving the software.
Novell hasn't been a force to be reckoned with in years. I'm not even sure why Microsoft bothers. Sure miss NetWare 3.X and 4.X. Talk about stable...
Microsoft puts out some FUD so that means game over for Novell?? This is NOT insightful this is trolling.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I grew up with Netware. I started my career in IT with Netware 3.x. You could load it on a box with 5MB of disk space and very little RAM. It made one hell of a print server and file server. NDS came out, and quickly we began setting up NW4.11 servers. I finally acquired a job at a multi-billion dollar corporation with 10s of 1000s of users and 1000s of computers. NDS was a champ. Group policies were a cinch. If you wanted to do something at any OU level, you could imagine it and do it easily. You could set a login script or permissions from the top or at any place down, all the way to a single user. It was understandable, flowing and made sense. It happened immediately. NW4.x servers could run tons of applications and not miss a lick. We had 300 sites nation-wide with a mix of 3.x and 4.x servers.
.12 boxes that ran for years. The time they finally died was when the corporation decided to go to Windows and we turned 'em off. We had a running tally of the longest running box found. The winner had years of run-time on it.
3.12 was a gem. Those damn things ran and ran. Only hardware would take it down. Most of the time problems stemmed around 3rd party backup software. Netware was never perfect, but to me it was as perfect as any NOS could be. People rail against Btrieve, but I supported it and never remembered it being that big a deal. We had 3.11 and
There wasn't a single, solitary thing wrong with Netware and no good reason, either support or money, to switch off it.
We went to Windows. NT4 was liquid shit. The old Netware guys were boggled at why we did it and wtf management was on. They joked: "got an application? make another server." Literally, we had to build a new server per database, per application, per anything. For the first time we understood that you had to restart windows, so a priority became scheduling weekly restarts of Windows boxes for no other reason than to make sure they kept running well.
As our IT shop grew and younger blood came in, we were hiring sharp, young guys who had known nothing but Windows. NT4 being ancient to them. So our main Cisco switch seemed to be an issue one day, and what do they do? They restart it. It turned out not to be the switch, but you can see their mindset -- restarting is what you do when managing servers. It's what you do with Windows.
Active Directory comes out. We use it today, but it's improved little. I manage it ever hour, and am constantly faced with the awkwardness and inability to do things in it that I could easily do a decade ago in NDS.
A server shouldn't have a fucking GUI. A server shouldn't need restarting. A server should serve data and services and that's it. It should be reliable. A directory service, directory tree should not need constant massaging and developers to create things that were built-in to another DS years ago.
The last time I ranted like this, I got modded down, but that doesn't change the fact. Management migrates off of working platforms and onto Windows for no other reason than marketing....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Read the first comment on this Newsforge Brainshare report.
When your CNE's are that frustrated, it's no wonder.
Sure, they talk about 1.8 million successful commercial transitions. What about the failures? How many companies tried to switch to Windows and either went out of business because of it or ended up limping back to Novell or another platform? ;)
Novell never really marketed Netware to the point Microsoft did. Technically though Netware NDS was better than AD. Being a CNE for a couple of decades, I can say that NDS handled replication much better than Active Directory (AD). I've had replication going to outer offices with just a 16k CIR with NDS, while AD has to have a minimum of 512kb CIR for replication. Of course Novell stuck with Console1 for to long and Java is just to painfully slow to be useful.
Windows is not done until Netware is broken?
Office XP Standard (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) is $73 on Pricewatch, 2003 is $77.
Novell have sounded as if they are for the chop for quite a while now so Microsoft's "triumphant" announcement isn't a great deal more than the equivalent of breaking into a hospital room and trying to roger the patient. Maybe Tim O'Reilly's next annual hoedown will be marked by Microsoft announcing that more Windows books are sold than O'Reilly sells open source books, so "therefore" O'Reilly must be no good? Exactly what are Microsoft so frightened of?
Not many corporations make a habit of crossing the road to stomp on some luckless fellow just for the hell of it, but Microsoft do. Some day, their behaviour is going to come back on Microsoft like a whirlwind. It's easy to say this is just the nature of capitalism. But most companies - not to mention individuals - have more sense than to stamp on every set of fingers they find. It's not only bad for the soul, it positively asking for a horrendous payback: one day, when you need a friend or a favour, you will find absolutely no one there.
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Slashdotters love to see people trashing Slashdot, or accusing it of bias. Attacking slashdot is more consistently crowd-pleasing than attacking SCO, or Microsoft, or even Bush. It's so effective you don't even have to be right, or have any idea what you're saying, to be moderated up, so long as you make Slashdot look bad. Case in point:
Um... is it, though? I mean, let's look. If you do a google search for site:slashdot.org firefox share, you get five slashdot articles about firefox market share on the front page. Out of these
So, looking here, I have one data point, and you have none. It looks to me for the moment like your assertion that slashdot represents pro-open source claims as facts and anti-open source facts as claims is simply false. You have given me no reason to believe otherwise. We have here three articles where positive Firefox market share news is stated as "[news source] says", one article where negative Firefox market share news is stated as plain fact with no qualifiers, and one article where positive Microsoft market share news is stated as "Microsoft says", with the word "claims" in the title. It looks to me like in the aggregate Firefox is getting worse treatment than Microsoft does here.
You seem to think there is some kind of negative implication in the choice of words "Microsoft claims"-- but this is simply an accurate statement of the article's content, and in no way unreasonable. While the three firefox articles cited above stem from some third party, here the source is Microsoft themselves. If we had "Firefox says" versus "Firefox claims" in the articles above, that would be one thing, but in all above cases the source is a journalistic entity, not Firefox themselves. Surely it is reasonable to depict statements by an apparent neutral third party differently from assertions made directly by a vendor with a vested interest in depicting their products positively?
Moreover, the word "claims" that you find so offensive doesn't even stem from Slashdot-- it's from the article. You know, that thing no one reads?Slashdot wouldn't know what journalistic integrity was if it bit Slashdot in the face. But if eweek is referring to this news with the words "Microsoft is claiming", how can one blame Slashdot for doing the same? I think you are just overgeneralizing.
Active Directory is the #1 server software that will benefit as a result of having a Windows Desktop monopoly. Thanks to closed proprietory protocols and Microsoft anti-competitive embrace and extend tactics of LDAP and kerberos Windows desktops work best with Active Directory.
Features like Single sign-on for Windows Desktops will only work seamlessly with Active Directory.
TCP/IP. I was a network admin at a place that rhymes with Brue Closs of California. They were primarily a Novell shop. Until Novell held out their IPX/SPX as the one true protocol. When applications didn't support it much anymore, we were forced to upgrade (After all, Unix is only for big-iron, right?).
Incidently: One of the largest mainframes ever belongs to them. It has every California medical information ever. From the results of your Uncle Jimbo's rectal exam to your sister's emergency pregnancy check. MASSIVE. And I've seen it. Come Y2K, they hired many many many COBOL programmers. And they were using phrases like: "Well, tomorrow, when we get processor time..." Very very very cool.
See subject
Microsoft will allways have an advantage in this area - they wrote the system from the ground up, so having absolute and complete control over each desktop is: A - very easy, and B - what system admins want in the first place.
As good as Novell is/was, it allways was a layer ontop of the client OS - not an OS in itself, so by design, in my opinion, Windows AD is superior in that respect.
Plus, AD is very easy to administer. I can't speak for Novell, but in Win2003 with the right GPOs in place; user, department, machine, and entire network controls are very easy to put in place & change at a click of a button.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Ford claims 20000 Horse & Buggy migration win.
Segway claims 3 bicycle migration win.
Yeah, but will a windows server continue to work after being sealed in a wall for 4 years?
Kind thoughts do not change the world
...is because the smallest damn thing crashes the entire system ("Aaargh, abend!"). *Anyone* writing code for Netware has to get it damn near perfect if they want something even vaguely releaseable.
Though, one can probably cite that as a virtue if you're twisted enough.
And then there is the documentation. Many headaches ensue when you discover system functions with int return types whose documentation states that the return values are strings! On the same page! And lets not forget the error number that has EIGHTY-SIX different interpretations attached to it, with zero information as to which the damn system means THIS time.
Considing the on-going reports that the majority of security threats occurs internal to the company, I find Microsoft's claim surprising. Stach & Liu's research on MD5 and MD4 collisions showed that MD5 took 500 times as long to crack than MD4. So have 3.3 million customers migrated their directory service to store passwords in MD4 format instead of MD5? Is the ease by which MD4 can be broken just not a consern?
1.8 million NetWare servers retired, or 1.8 million Wintel servers purchased? I could "retire" an MQ cluster here at work, if I was willing to replace 6 AIX LPARs with about 18 Windows machines....
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The Y2K bug got MANY companies to realize the incredibly steep price of relying on obsolete software. After Y2K, successful companies realized the value of keeping their systems modernized to alleviate security issues, assure availability of hardware upgrades/replacements/service, and allow interoperability with newer software and web services. I don't know about all businesses, but mine can't get by with just office and a web browser.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
No double standard at all. People don't trust organizations that lie to them. Microsoft is full of shit and everyone knows it.
Oh yeah, people also don't like organizations that sue public schools and threaten everyone.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?A ID=/20060321/NEWS01/603210334/-1/CINCI
s tory?coll=ktla-news-1
http://ktla.trb.com/news/ktla-shawnlawn,0,723987.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...and ABEND to that!
Back in the day (well, the prehistoric computing day), IBM was the "Yes, sir!" company -- we're talking the 60s and 70s here. If you bought IBM products for the corporate server farm, you deserved a real, "Attaboy!", "Job well done," "Can't go wrong choosing IBM." It's this same kind of dull-thinking, clone mentality that is the mindset public schools are facing today.
The school district I work in is stumbling toward Microsoft oblivion from our fabulous Netware systems. We pay a tad shy of $40K/year for unlimited Netware servers, client software, GroupWise (I like it a whole lot more than any Outlook), ZENWorks for desktop management/policies/imaging. We haven't been allowed to even try using any of the other Novell tools that are included in our School License Agreement, namely iFolder, NDPS, easy inventory management. Mostly because if the users got a taste of iFolder and being able to access their school server storage securely from home, there'd be no way they'd allow a migration to continue.
There really is no confirmed $$ amount for what it will cost to migrate all the servers in the school district to Windows 2003, set up multiple M$ Exchange boxes to replace the single GroupWise box, there is no plan for a desktop management package because the licensing fees are out of this world, and imaging software (probably a seat license for Symantec Ghost) is an unknown cost factor to replace the fantastic ZENWorks.
It's all a marketing thing -- the IT director (and I use the term loosely) has been simply sold a bill of goods and has no clue how to finish the task or even get any distance along the path.
In the meantime, we're a half Netware 6.x/half M$ Server 2003 district with everyone quivering in fear: "Will my school be next to migrate?"
The servers just don't break and I've been quasi-admining the servers on my campus since 1996 and 3.11. I dread going back to Windows policy management after working with ZENWorks for so long. I would rather just be running SuSE servers and desktops and be done with the whole Windows thing, but schools feel the children can't be deprived of the M$ experience.
So, management is familiar with the looks, gets anedotal confirmation about the product from non-IT friends, and doesn't care if the server goes down once in a while. Sounds like Windows. And a Windows world it is.
I've managed NetWare for over a decade. It was great stuff. It fell behind. The culture at Novell and it's rabid fan base failed to examine NetWare and it's future critically before it really suffered. It still has great parts - eDirectory, Zenworks, NMAS, NetStorage, and iFolder (now open source) and I'm hoping it makes it on Linux. I'm not convinced yet as they still have some doubtful management in place. We'll see how they handle that hopefully sooner rather than later.
Regardless of the reputation, the point is that it is the company itself making these claims. Anyone or any company blowing their own horn is always going to be taken with a grain of salt, even if they have a good reputation.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
It's tough, but I admire Novell for its "never say die" attitude. Novell needs to convert its technical strength and what they have to sales... We all know that you don't need a superior product to sell... But when almost everywhere is already running Windows, it just won't be easy.
That is very strange. We've been running Novell since 3.12 and are currently on Netware 6.5sp5. While we have seen some minor foibles on some service packs where we had to move back to the older service pack which is easy we have not seen any where near the problems that Windows has had over the years with stability.
I'm surprised that anyone running Netware on stable hardware would have a claim to say that QA has gone downhill. Our Novell servers typically run for months without a reboot while the application vendors on our NT servers recomend that we reboot them at least weekly and two of them recomend daily. Now that's reliabilty?
The last I checked Novell was still used by more Fortune 500 companies as the core of their network than Microsoft and has had some major migrations themselves over the years.
SuSe based OES is just getting started all of the legendary Novell services are being ported over to run over Linux Edirectory, NSS, etc. All access rights in NSS will now be available over a linux kernal.
I would think that every Linux Admin would want to take a look at what a robust set of management tools OES is bringing to a respected Linux distribution like SuSe. On top of that with the Novell Client you get transparent authentication via a Linux distribution into the OES server.
I think you old school Novell people are missing something if you haven't downloaded the free OES server demo and checked it out. Not only are you starting to get all of what made Novell great you are getting everything that makes Linux such a phenominal platform as well. Novell is even Open Sourcing some of it's technologies most notably their mail server Netmail has been released as Hula and is a very robust Open Source email and calendaring system.
It's got a lot of years of Novell blood sweat and tears in it and they've made it Open Source. Talk about giving something back to the community.
Come on Linux heads check out something that really extends Linux to be able to continue to fit new and varying needs of the enterprise. Everyone says Microsoft wins on marketing. Well word of mouth still works great for marketing. Give Novell SuSe OES and try and see what you think.
I tried that and didn't get modded up at all.