Slashdot Mirror
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.
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)
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
This is just plain stupid?
Why leave if its better and cheaper to administrate?
People wonder why Windows remains king over Linux and I think its corporate America's view that one vendor should decide everything for them as a way to cut down on costs. Meanwhile they are being robbed and price gouged.
Have you seen the price of MS Office? What is Apple's office suite? $79?
They get what they deserve. I just hope the rest of the world such as Europe and South America dont drink the MS coolaid as much.
http://saveie6.com/
"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) !
How many users has Microsoft lost to Samba?
Okay, wait a minute.
Office is certainly overpriced for non corporate users. But iWork (Apple's "office suite") swings too far in the other direction. In its standard/academic editions, MS Office ships with Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word.
iWork ships with Pages (a page layout / word processing app) and Keynote (their equivalent to PowerPoint).
It's my opinion that you can't describe something as an office suite without a spreadsheet. But that's just me.
Apparently new corporate methodology is to not only reinvent the wheel, but to rip out one's fingernails before attempting the process. It doesn't make sense why corporations would take what works and toss it out for something that doesn't work well, but apparently 3 million folks are learning that lesson first-hand.
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.
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
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.