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?

[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

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

[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.

Whats attachmate?

[vlm]

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

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.

another ms partner..

[Jeek Elemental]

will meet you all here again when its Nokias turn

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: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.