from the paxtonland technologia department:
Slashdot: Is Novell Doomed? Slashdotters speculate on the magazine and discussion groups that Novell is a dead horse. Once again, I find myself intrigued by the nasty banter in the /. discussion forums. However, I won’t participate and have people less intelligent than myself rate my comments. This time, they do have something of a point. I’ve had a lot of conversations with other Novell intelligencia on this topic. We all had differing viewpoints about whether or not Novell lost the file/print serving marketplace fair and square. Rumors and experience in the field tells us that M$ purposefully tampered with IPX/SPX and operability with Novell’s Client 32. But, we could all agree that they really dropped the ball concerning the sale of Word Perfect and the positioning and marketing of NDS.
History: LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) was developed, in large part by the UofM in Ann Arbor. At the time it was known as the x.500 program. Many of the people who belonged to that program either went to work for Novell, or went to work for Netscape in development of Netscape Directory
Services. I’ll spare you the details behind all of this, but you should know that NDS is largely based on the x.500 architecture and relies very heavily upon LDAP. Very exciting technology, let’s just say that everybody loved it, and still loves it. Novell pulled it off best, Netscape did a nice job too, Microsoft’s Active Directory
databases are reported to be very slow when database items (or, resources) become numerous (>50,000). However, on paper, Active Directory looks better than NDS. Active Directory is a hierarchical, extensible, object-based database that uses sequence number-based replication. It also, on paper, uses existing standards (DNS, Kerberos,SMTP), or proprietary MS versions of the same.
So, about 2 years ago, I attended a very high level conference sponsored by Dell and
Novell. They spoke of great things, using great technology, to make great heaps of
money. Wonderful, whatever… The speaker from Novell was a former IBM marketing exec. I spoke to him during the luncheon breakout, I purposefully sat myself at his table. I asked him about the debacle that IBM created with the mis-management and mis-marketing of OS/2. He nervously tugged at his tie and explained that, of course, all marketing decisions were passed down from above. In other words, they weren’t responsible for the bad decisions, botched launch, and poor follow through on this OS.
Now, this same person was a marketing VP for Novell?!?
Get my drift? Good lord, no wonder Novell is starting to tank. They are being marketed by the same bunch of boobs that botched OS/2, the best networking, business OS available at that time. Light years ahead of Win 3.1, Win95, MacOS, and X-Windows clients.
If they had only taken NDS out of the NOS (network operating system). Meaning, why not package NDS as a separate product and sell it as a database, resource manager, and web server, even messaging server. They could have ported it to WinNT/2K/UNIX/LINUX/even mainframes. Design and market it as to serve resources, all user authentication, provide extensible data, provide web ennoblement of files and other network resources and objects… duh! If they would have done that, many intranet/extranet planning and implementation problems would have been solved (circa 1997!). Instead of wrestling with the security and multiple problems with IIS, they could have used NDS. Instead of trying to figure out how to tie all of their crappy old systems together with “on the fly” data conversion tricks like MQSeries, they could have used NDS. (etc…etc…) Given the platform for a nice, secure, extensible, database model… NDS and Novell could have become the e-commerce ennoblement wunderkind. Imagine one, nice, secure, standards based database serving all of that AND your product catalog? In fact, now that I think about it, isn’t that what XML is supposed to do?
Well, they finally are positioning NDS as that. Just now, a day late and about 4.5 billion dollars behind M$. Let’s hope that they get a major interested party to partner with, such as Oracle, or Sybase, or even I-Planet. If not, then they probably are doomed. What’s more, the people that are still using the older NOS’s (v2-4,5) are doomed to the eternal damnation of self-support. Not that you aren’t already damned to that same hell with M$ and Win2K.