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.

Comments

you are missing the point....

[Anonymous Coward]

these customers are choosing to upgrade to Windows, rather then follow Netware's recomended upgrade path (linux)

It's a shame....

[Himring]

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.

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 .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.

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....