Novell Completes Sale

symbolset writes "Today Novell completed its sale to Attachmate. The company will be a wholly owned subsidiary and be delisted from the stock exchange. Novell was once a dominant player in network software, and its passing signals the end of an era."

Comments

Corel Wordperfect is still around

[Toe, The]

Reading this, I kinda wondered what ever became of Wordperfect, once a dominant player in the business world (along with Lotus 123), before Microsoft, well, Microsofted them.

Now I remember, Corel bought Wordperfect, and apparently it's still around.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[guruevi]

That's indeed part of the problem. MS used secret API's in Word that made it work much faster (you know, back in the day when everything was optimized in order to be able to run acceptably) than WordPerfect. It also happened that if you installed a version of Word, WordPerfect would start crashing because of a missing or replaced DLL.

But WordPerfect was not without fault either, they made mistakes marketing, they made mistakes programming, they basically pulled a Vista. They had (and still have) a much better word processor than Word and it's continuing to be used although they're not the cash cow they once were.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[rudy_wayne]

Reading this, I kinda wondered what ever became of Wordperfect, once a dominant player in the business world (along with Lotus 123), before Microsoft, well, Microsofted them.

Now I remember, Corel bought Wordperfect, and apparently it's still around.

Microsoft really had nothing to do with Wordperfect's death. They were far and away the number one DOS word processor and felt they could ignore that newfangled Windows thing that came along. By the time they realized that Windows wasn't a passing fad, it was too late. And it didn't help that their intial Windows versions were crap.

Novell bought Wordperfect for $800 Million and just a couple of years later sold it to Corel for $200 Million. Then a few years later Corel (the entire company) was sold for $200 million.

Memories

[Compaqt]

Netware
Utah
WordPerfect
QuattroPro
Digital Research
DR-DOS
Simian GNOME
Suse
USL
UNIX
SCO
patents
Mono

Re:So Long Novell

[bratloaf]

I recently got called in by a client to "help out a relative with their server". A smallish family business at least three generations deep (selling and maintaining farm equipment). When I arrived I was greeted with a lot of questions - about if I could possibly help them move their office to a smaller space down the road. They were very concerned about their server, because a bigger local consulting company had told them it would cost $4000 to move it to a new office.

I took a look, and found a pristine (c) 1992 DEC server (x86) running Netware 3.1 with two software mirrored SCSI drives. 10-base-T, and an old "concentrator". Heheh...

Workstations were IBM PCs (the old style) with Novell ethernet network cards.

I backed up their entire server (SYS vol and DATA vol) to my FLASH DRIVE. Did some testing offline to be sure their (c)1994 accounting software could be made to run independently of the server if needed, and moved their stuff the next weekend. The server had been up for 2664 days. Uneventful move. Server is still up. We plan to replace it with a small SAN sometime this summer. That thing had been running 24/7 with only a few reboots due to power loss since 1992. This just happened a month or two ago. (And no, no one had ever applied the Y2K fixes to it...)

Crazy reliable.

Re:So Long Novell

[Quato]

Why did you replace?
Why didn't you revert to Netware?

The word came down from management that Exchange/Outlook was going to be the way of the future. So we needed a domain server, a Exchange server and a couple of file servers. Of course our Novell server did this all in one machine, and did it a hell of a lot faster.
Novell didn't go out of style because of poor design, it went out of style because Microsoft put more advertising out and convinced more users in upper management that it was the best thing out there.
All of a sudden there was this if it isn't 'Windows on Intel it's crap mentatlity' that made Microsoft what it is.

Re:No good?

[black6host]

I did a lot of work with Novell back in the 3.x days and it was a workhorse. When Microsoft first decided to try and penetrate the server market NT was a joke. I won't say that current MS server products are not good, in some cases they are. In my opinion, what really killed Novell and boosted Microsoft was that anyone and their brother could write server side code for Windows (not that it means it was good code, just much easier to do.) You had to be pretty good to write server side Novell code. So business who needed a server side app would go with cheap and available.

Then, essential apps started to appear that were only written for Windows. So even if you ran Novell you had to have a Windows server to handle the database or whatever. I saw it countless times and it worked in MS's favor. Finally folks just said why run two different server OSs? About that time Windows Server 2000 was out and it wasn't nearly as bad as the versions before. Trust me, I loved Novell. Rock solid. But it could only be that way in a manner that prevented every Tom, Dick and Harry from writing the next greatest customer management system. No winning IDEs like Delphi or, shudder, VB and Access so easily accessible. (Or other MS development languages.) MS made it easy to write code for the server. Note: I didn't say good code. And those apps sold. And they sold Windows along with it.