Microsoft-Novell Relationship Hits the Skids

Anonymous writes "According to Channelweb, the bloom might be off the rose in the Novell-Microsoft relationship: the two companies didn't sign a single, solitary large customer to a Novell Linux deal during the most recent quarter. 'So Novell, one of the biggest Linux distributors in the world, and Microsoft, one of the biggest companies in world history, couldn't find a single large customer on Planet Earth to buy into Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server software. Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian has stepped up and, rather than point fingers at Microsoft for that performance, put the blame on his company and its inability to strengthen its reseller channel.'"

Comments

Re:And Raise Your Hand If You're Surprised

[rickb928]

Until 2005, my Netware servers were an order of magnitude mroe reliable than my Windows servers. Period.

NDS 'worked' when AD was borked. Does no one remember mixed mode, and the joy of early Server 2K? We will leave NTAS out of this, though it was the first competitor to NetWare.

The myth that NetWare is no better or worse than Windows was untrue up till Server '03, and then only barely.

The real reason NetWare failed to survive? Not reliability. Applications. Microsoft built apps on Windows servers that you could program in essentially the same IDE as the client Windows desktop app. NetWare required you learn .NLMs and be in a foreign and not very good IDE. Microsoft salted the community with freebie dev tools, and from there on in, it was over. Of course, hosing the Novell client didn't hurt either. As an example, the Novell client would return a 'not found' in 2 seconds when it had searched the tree and did not find what you were looking for. The Microsoft client would then spend 15 seconds begging for a response from any resource, after it had searched all it knew. Ok, just for grins, why would you ask essentially 'anybody out there got this?' when you have already searched all you know? The fraking MUP drove us crazy. And people blamed Novell. Nice.

Microsoft out smarted Novell. We lost. Darn. But not because they were better.