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

No good?

[spudnic]

So my 3.12 CNE is no good any more? Dang!

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.

Re:No good?

[cusco]

Place that I worked in the late '90s was partly Novell 3.12 and partly NT 4.0, and I noticed two things almost immediately. First, the Windows side was **MUCH** easier to manage than the Novell side, especially the centralized user management. Second, Novell saddled its customers with IPX/SPX and wouldn't support TCP/IP for quite a long time, which made accessing the Internet from within your network operating system annoyingly difficult. On the other hand, we had to reboot the NT servers every two or three months while the Novell servers only needed reboots about once a year.

Novell 4 was a great product, but it was about a year too late and the upgrade was FAR too expensive for most of their customers. Microsoft realized early on that 'good enough' really was good enough for most of their customers. Novell wanted to take the time and do their LDAP implementation correctly, and customers didn't want to wait for centralized management. Then in one of the dumbest pricing schemes I've ever seen, at the beginning it actually cost more to upgrade from 3.12 to 4 than it cost to install from scratch. Pissed off an awful lot of admin.

So what will happen to OpenSuse?

[kalpol]

I am fond of that distribution - any word on whether it will still be maintained?

Re:So what will happen to OpenSuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Attachmate have stated that there will be no change in the relationship between SUSE and OpenSUSE

http://www.attachmate.com/Press/PressReleases/nov-22-2010-SUSE.htm

Re:So what will happen to OpenSuse?

[sudden.zero]

It looks like they will continue maintaining SUSE according to their website http://www.attachmategroup.com/ . It also looks like they are going to continue using the Novell name. Both the Suse and Novell logos are on their site.

Re:So what will happen to OpenSuse?

[Xtifr]

Indeed, given that Suse was reportedly one of Novell's main profit centers, it seems unlikely that it or OpenSuse is in any danger of disappearing. In fact, it looks like Suse may be becoming a separate subsidiary of Attachmate, independent of the former Novell

Final Abend

[nbvb]

UNLOAD NOVELL.NLM

System halted Wednesday, April 27, 2011 4:30:00 pm EDT

  Abend: Page Fault Processor Exception (Error code 00000002)
          OS version: Novell NetWare 4.10 November 8, 1994
        Running Process: SCRSAVER.NLM
          Stack: AC 1F 65 01 E7 66 03 F1 50 CA 65 01 03 00 00 00
                          D0 1F 65 01 09 00 00 00 B0 81 01 F9 54 CE 65 01
                        39 67 03 F1 0B CB 65 01 B4 D0 65 01 B0 81 01 F9
    Press "Y" to copy diagnostic image to disk.
    Otherwise press "X" to exit.

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

[RatBastard]

That and the version they did come out with, 5.2 for Windows, was crap. By the time they did come out with a good version it was way too late.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[iplayfast]

Wasn't there a problem with WordPerfect working with windows due to api details being withheld?

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[Richard_at_work]

Thats the common folklore myth, but theres little grounding to it - the issues WordPerfect 5.1 (the first Windows version) was down to a poorly adaptable architecture internally and the fact that Windows superseded most of the advantages that WordPerfect had enjoyed up until then (a consistent internal character set which meant that WordPerfect 5.1 couldn't handle all of the languages that Windows did, and the fact that Windows entirely replaced the print subsystem that WordPerfect had used up until then, making its extensive print driver collection worthless).

Sure, like Netscape, Microsoft had a hand in its death, but the real story, again just like Netscape, was that the product lost its competitive edge and fell by the way side.

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.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[inode_buddha]

Um, some of us were actually around when it was all happening, some of us can read court documents, and some of us have *long* memories.

I call astroturf.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[plover]

That was ordinary, garden variety, DLL-hell. Every Windows app suffered from it. Microsoft simply understood the details of how to leverage it to make sure their apps weren't on the receiving end of the fail stick.

Microsoft's version control universally sucked. Windows installers sucked even harder. Everyone suffered from that crappy architecture, including the competitors to Word.

Memories

[Compaqt]

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

Re:Memories

[Stormwatch]

Burma shave.

not the least bit surprising

[v1]

Just another example of innovate or die. They had a HUGE place in business servers years ago, and then they just sat down on their laurels, and never stood back up.

Was there even anything worth acquiring in this sale? even the name brings a musty smell to a conversation.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Just another example of innovate or die. They had a HUGE place in business servers years ago, and then they just sat down on their laurels, and never stood back up.

No, their prices were being undercut by Microsoft, which had independent revenue stream in the form of MsOffice and Windows. It is impossible for any company to fight this in their own turf. Microsoft will simply wait for you to run out of cash and then sweep in and peck on the carcass.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[geekoid]

No, there network stack was horrid, and they where late to tcp/ip. trying to force IPX to be the de facto standard.

Novell was under cutting MS, not the other way around. They moved very expensive net cards at cost, and if pressed they would give you netware.

Novell could not handle large business and large business number of users. In a desperate attempt to deal with this they bought Unix. Instead of improving their design.

By the 90s MS TCP/IP implementation was starting to blow Novell IPX out of the water,a nd then Novell stumbled with there implementation.

Seriously people, MS was the small player at that time.

Then they made the mistake of deciding to compete with MS in the Office dept. WordPerfect was a big mistake.

When this happened Novell was the big player, MS was small time.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[wrook]

One place they had some business was in migrating businesses from Netware to Linux. I once talked to a salesman about their Linux business trying to understand how they were going to make money. His answer was that they would offer user hand-holding support, but no custom development contracts. They were intent on offering free tools to make it attractive to move away from Netware and Novell intended to basically charge for the service doing that. But they seemed to have no plan what so ever about how to make money once their customers were on Linux. It seemed to me that it was merely a question of time before they packed it in.

Whats attachmate?

[vlm]

Whats "Attachmate"? Dating website? Some sort of trademarked fastener, you know, like tapcon (tm)?

Value

[tripleevenfall]

Andsomethingthatusedtobeofvaluewaslost?

another ms partner..

[Jeek Elemental]

will meet you all here again when its Nokias turn

Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[damn_registrars]

Sometimes, the company with the best product is not the company with the best business strategy. And we've seen before that when that happens, the company with the crappy product and the better business strategy almost always wins.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[grasshoppa]

You're basically talking about eDirectory vs Active Directory, right? And you are implying that eDirectory was the better product?

Uh no. That was true 15 years ago, but as soon as Active Directory came out it was time to jump ship to MS. Still, to this day Novell has a few hold outs ( and sadly, I've worked at several of them ). The difference between AD and ED is startling. Why any company would put up with ED is beyond me; I'm fairly certain that some of the CIOs involved were getting kick backs from Novell. That's the only thing that makes sense.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[damn_registrars]

The value of eDirectory vs AD is debatable. However the advantages of Novell are clear regardless. Windows servers are bloated, overpriced, and underperforming with regards to reliability and capabilities. Netware servers would pull 5 or 6 nines routinely on their own, while you would need a server farm to pull even 4 or more nines with Windows server.

In other words, Netware was cheaper, more reliable, and required less hardware. On top of that, Netware had very few security flaws to tend to. On the other hand Windows ran poorly, was more expensive, and needed constant attention.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[Taelron]

Active Directory was originally technology licensed from Banyan Vines. When Banyan went under, Microsoft received free reign to use the technology wholesale.

Under Banyan Vines it was called StreetTalk. Your login was your name @ office @ organization or jsmith@houston@slashdot

It was far superior to NT 4.0's domain system and was licensed for inclusion into Active Directory starting with Windows 2000. In Banyan, all file shares and printers were easily located in the directory the same way. Resource @ server @ organization such as: publicfiles@serverca001@slashdot or xeroxprinter@serverny003, part of the reason Microsoft licensed the technology was to enable placing resources in the directory structure.

The downside to StreetTalk was networks with over 1024 servers. It was never intended to grow that large back in the 80's and early 90's. The largest Banyan Vines network was actually run by the United States Marine Corps with over 5800 servers. The Marines had to break the network up into three sections each containing less than 2000 servers. They created what was called ELMS gateways that linked and allowed some resources to be shared across the three different "zones".

Starting in 1998 the Marines Corps began transitioning away from Banyan Vines to Windows NT 4.0 and the release of Windows 2000 with Active Directory which was updated to address the issues the Marines had with large networks was the final deathblow to Banyan in the US market. Shortly afterwards Banyan announced they were going back to making hardware only and licensing the StreetTalk directory out. Within a couple of years Banyan was gone from the networking world.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[Taelron]

Banyan's largest customer worldwide was the United States Marine Corps. The penetration into the US network market never exceeded 24%. They were actually much larger in Europe than they were in America having around 40% of the market.

Banyan originally started out making ICA (communication cards) for mainframes and other Network OS's. They decided to have a go at making their own NOS to exploit both the hardware and software side of the house. The Banyan servers sat on top of a bastardized unix operating system. Kernel access as they called it, effectively Root at the command line, was a tightly guarded secret, even though there was just one hard coded login for all Banyan Servers.

Quality Assurance was not a priority at Banyan, often times you would receive updates, but on several occasions you would have to apply a patch to a patch, before you patched your server. Instead of just releasing a total update package, you would have to update all patch files incrementally and then apply them to the server.

In 1995 we still had to use DOS clients and windows 3.1x computers. By 1996 we were rolling out Windows 95 machines with the Windows Banyan Client that worked decently enough, though your email (which was incorporated into the server code) was still a dos client. The windows clients with any functionality did not come out until almost 1997.

The servers came with all software installed and loaded for every option, but you required a dongle on the parallel port of your computer to unlock "features" of the software. You could place two dongles over each other and move features from one dongle to another (deactivating the first dongle). And use software codes to unlock new features on the dongles hashed against its serial number.

There were many features of Banyan we missed and hated losing when we switched to Windows NT 4.0 and Exchange 5.0 and 5.5... Though Banyan was example again of a company with a good technology failing to fully maintain and develop it.

In the air of full disclosure, I was a Banyan Certified Engineer (BCE) for the Marines back in the middle to late 90's.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[cusco]

Best example ever of that was Digital Equipment Corp. Best hardware in the world, worst salesmen in the world. My former boss used to call engineering support to get pricing on equipment because the salescritters would never call her back.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[damn_registrars]

I can't agree with you more on that one. At one point I had in my hardware ensemble at work a quad-cpu Alpha, each cpu at 667 MHz and 8gb ram total. That one box was faster than an entire rack of 2GHz Intel P4 systems. DEC was then sold to Compaq, who merged with HP. Which lead to the death of one of the greatest RISC chips the world has ever seen.

Re:So Long Novell

[Wyatt Earp]

I worked in a 4.11 shop, it worked just fine, years of uptime. Groupwise had some problems, the migration to 5 was nightmarish.

I really think IPX instead of IP was a mistake after 1995 though.

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.

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[account_deleted]

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[account_deleted]

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Novell behaved perfectly rationally

[JTW]

Software companies have their own "physical laws" of operation.

1. Innovate
2. Incorporate
3. Reorganize
4. Downsize
5. Distribute the proceeds

It's just completing the cycle.

I couldn't name a company that has escaped this Schwartz child limit. Microsoft isn't so much that type of company as a "holding company" and it has a longer life cycle. If companies were stars, Microsoft would be a red dwarf, Novell a yellow sun, Netscape a blue giant (or maybe a Eta Carinae that went Nova).

If Microsoft lasts as long it could be with us for billions and billions of years (lol).

Re:free at last?

[MarcQuadra]

Actually, I've always wondered this. Are there a lot of corrupt/illegal kickbacks in I.T.? I'm not in management, but sometimes it feels like the entire organization is pointing at a cheap, simple, effective solution, and management goes and picks some multi-million-dollar monster that takes a year to set up.

Also, I've met a LOT of I.T. sales folks, and most give me the willies.

Can't live on legacy business forever

[sjbe]

They had a HUGE place in business servers years ago, and then they just sat down on their laurels, and never stood back up.

Their Netware product was arguably better that Microsoft's offerings but the problem was that Microsoft's competing product was good enough for most customers and it was cheaper and bundled. Businesses don't make money by buying network management software. Novell built their Netware business around features that was missing in Microsoft's offerings. When Microsoft provided it, Novell's business model no longer made sense. The only reason they hung around as long as they did is because ripping that sort of software out and replacing it is an expensive pain in the ass. But you can't live on legacy customers forever.

For the same reasons I would never buy (to hold) stock in an anti-virus vendor, inkjet cartridge refill company, or any other company whose business is based on some mis-feature of another company's product. They can be put out of business very easily.

Re:SCO won after all, so, what does that say?

[Shimbo]

If this is victory, I don't know what defeat would look like. Novell shareholders will get roughly $2 billion dollars; SCO shareholders will probably get nothing.

Novell's rights to the legacy System V business was only of significant value in SCO's fantasy world where Linux was a derivate of System V.

Re:So Long Novell

[HornWumpus]

You haven't lived until you genned sys on netmare* 2 with only floppys. Better get it right the first time.

Once you got the first server up you copied the floppy images onto the bastard but there was no avoiding that feed at least once. What possible reason could there be for an installer to need the floppys that many times? I carried a server with me to do installs after once.

I think a large part of Netwares demise was CNE. Theoretically, they wouldn't even sell you a license unless you were in 'the club'. Novell basically saw CNE as a franchise and 'license to steal' early on. My cost on grey market was less then his cost at local dealer (Novell alphabet soup.) We knew each other.

*IMHO if version =5 netmare else netware

Re:ANOTHER LINUX "COMPANY" BITES TEH DUST !!

[d6]

Quit trolling AC. We all know SCO owns linux.

Re:free at last?

[LDAPMAN]

That 8 character limitation is the choice of your company. User names for eDir/Netware/OES can be up to 128 characters.