Further to Bob's 3rd point. Don't forget that Windows was (and essentially still is) a unified client and server operating system. Netware came out of a period where it was taken for granted that the clients and the servers would run different OS's.

Although, now that I think of it, Unix could be called a unified client and server OS too. However most organizations of that era weren't running Unix, or if they were, it was a server OS only.

Bob, you are right enough to be correct...

NetWare offered a significantly more stable application platform than Windows anything back then. But programmers had to learn some different ways. Alas, it was probably easy to sell programmers on using the same environment, tools, pardigms, and many of the same techniques to program the front end (Windows 9x) and the back end (Windows NTAS), and the rest is indeed history.

I don't doubt, however, that selling Windows servers back then was also a sale to the executives (suits). The premise for many of my NetWare clients was that if Windows was running on the workstation, wouldn't things run better (more reliably, faster, etc.) if the servers were Windows also? We know better now, but the sales pitch worked a lot.

As for the administrative interface being a GUI, NetWare didn't lag far behind that, since NDS offered a GUI pretty quickly. But the change to a directory did open the door to migration, not just upgrade. And NetWare got beat.

It was never a fair fight, either. Microsoft didn't really need to intentionally break the Novell Client for Windows. Windows networking was pretty flaky back then, and it was easy to blame issues on Novell, whatever the truth of the matter.

Some applications did thrive on NetWare, besides Btrieve. PostgreSQL and Advantage were stable and productive database engines. And NetWare was pretty reliable in an era where Windows NTAS was in a 'reboot weekly' mode, if not 'daily'. And NetWare was pretty much impervious to viruses and other malware which was just starting to become a problem. But technical excellence is never a guarantee of market success.

I miss NetWare. It just worked, mostly. Not perfect, but very, very good.

Let's not get started on GroupWise, or even WordPerfect Office. Let dead dogs sleep...

Rick

"Whatever else you might say about Windows, administration was easier to learn since it was 100% GUI-driven."

true, but if you are a windows admin tasked with setting up DNS or Exchange and you don't understand DNS or sendmail, you will botch things terribly. GUI or no GUI. I've seen it and lived it.

I agree with your other points. And I believe that what the letter writer mentioned is plausible and probably happened to some extent.

Bob,

You're spot on with the last point.

I'm too young to have worked in IT when Novell was the dominant platform (although ironically, I now work for a company that uses Novell NDS and Groupwise). But Novell advocates invariably focus on the IT merits of the solution rather than whether the solution can meet the business needs of the company -- and that means access to the *applications* you need.

People will always choose the simplest solution that's "good enough". Not what's technically the "best".

Why did Windows NT take off and Novell stumble? Two big reasons that appear would have the oppisit affect.

First - Security. With Novell you had to by default add security. Out of the box it was locked down. With windows it was pretty much the oppisite - it was wide open and you had to remove access. You had to know what you were doing to get a Netware server working, while just about anybody could get a Windows box up and usable - just not very secure.

Second - License Enforcement. This follows the same as security. When you installed a new Netware server you had to have a unique registration disk. You could not get yourself out of compliance. With Windows you could bring up a server unlicensed with no issues. This allowed administrators to bring up a Windows server for testing with no cash outlay, prove a concept and roll it into production. Maybe later they would worry about buying a license for it.

I always wondered if Microsoft did this on purpose to flood the market with Windows servers - even if it meant having 50% or more of them unlicensed. It was a way to take market share from Netware.

Bob's point about the differences between NetWare 3.x and 4.x can't be overstated. I worked in two Novell 3 shops. There was never much pressure to upgrade because once you had a stable NetWare server up and running, it tended to stay that way. I think that TCP/IP helped build more tiny empires than Windows servers.

My experience working for a small software company trying to get our application to work on Netware was that it was virtually impossible to speak to anyone at Novell. They showed no interest in helping us with problems we were running into.

Our experience with Microsoft a year or so later was very different. Senior engineers called back to confirm that their suggestions had solved the problem.

If our experience was representative, it is no surprise that development moved rapidly and preferentially to Microsoft.

Netware is still a way better file server then the Windows servers until you look at what you see from the client side. We heavily use file servers but we have replaced all of our NW servers because of the problems on the client side.

- Reliability: Unless you really mess something up it would be hard to setup a NW server that couldn't easily run stably past 1000 days of up time. (The highest uptime I have personally seen is over 7 years.) That is almost impossible on a Windows server. No one has ever seen a Windows server with anywhere near 3 years of uptime.

- Ease of management: NW is a dream. NDS makes granular permissions easy and anyone can easily be taught to see where user's rights are set and what to do about it. All of the settings are on the actual objects and it is in a simple logically consistent (and obvious) arrangement. Active Directory is a whole bunch of settings put in a box and shaken up so that no one can find them unless they spend long hours memorizing them and have someone or a book show them. Calling it a directory ignores the fact that a directory is supposed to put things in order!

- Speed of deployment: I can build a complete, mirrored NW 3.12 file server in less then 10 minutes. (Not an exaggeration: Bet me!) That includes selecting the computer to pull off the shelf, grabbing matching hard drives, dumping the DOS boot image on the drives and running the install. With Windows even if I have a complete patched image I can't load the image and get Windows booted in that period of time. Mirroring will take 45 minutes and that cant be interrupted unlike NW.

- Alerts: If something weird happens on a NW server the server will beep incessantly to make you notice that you have a problem. On any Windows box if you have disks errors or even have a mirror break your total notice is: Nothing! You can check the event log and search for an error but the computer just won't tell you. (Microsoft: Are you listening? This is the single most insane thing in ALL versions of Windows. The computer can see the error and it is serious. Why doesn't it tell the users?) I had a Windows server reboot one day and suddenly all of the data was 6 months old! How could that happen? Apparently the mirrored drive went offline 6 months earlier without making a peep and when the other drive completely failed the computer rebooted to the drive with the old data.

- File handling: With NW you can easily undelete multiple versions of a file. I have recovered print jobs that were printed more then a year ago with this feature! You can EASILY see who created, deleted, or even has locked any file. With Windows when the file is deleted it is dust. Who did it? Who knows... Is a file locked? Lets scan through a list of every file lock on the system. Want to remove a specific lock? Ha!

At this point it would look like going to Windows is insane so why would anyone do it?
- The vast majority of people touching computers are familiar with Windows and that is the pool of people that Sys Admins grow out of. A silly reason but true...
- The non technical people making buying decisions saw NW servers with the red snake screen saver and NT servers with the 3D Pipes screensaver and made an assumption about the sophistication of each system. (They didn't realize that the snake is a meter.) Another silly reason but those with the checkbooks are in charge.
- NW would deny access to connections above the number of licenses. NT would let 100 people log into a 5 user box.
- NW missed the boat on application services. The biggest problem is almost all of your programmers are writing applications for Windows boxes so when it comes time to write code for the server of course they will be writing code for Windows servers.
- NW is perfect as a file server except when you look at the actual client communication. If you severely stress the file services connection from a Windows client to a NW box (like copying 5 gig worth of 20k files) it will have spurious file errors. The client will think it has disconnected from time to time. This basic flaw causes a whole host of subtle errors that can corrupt data on a naggingly rare basis. I suspect that this could be an intentional subtle flaw in Windows. It worked because it forced me to replace 400+ servers that were rock solid reliable.

Speaking to Jeff's point: developer support was one area where Microsoft was brilliant. You get an MSDN subscription, and you have access to all of their server technology along with reams of example code and articles.

Why fiddle around buying a copy of Netware and Btrieve and then striking out on my own to test some new idea called client-server, when for $2000/year, I had access to the latest version of everything (granted, it's a little higher now). I could pull out NT and SQL Server from MSDN, along with droves technical information.

With relatively low risk, you could test a solution and what's more, you could use the same development tools that you used for your client-side apps. Oh, and you could test and debug the server side apps on your development PC. Pure magic.

Novell blew it when they had it in the bag with UnixWare and threw it all away. All they would have had to do was convert their customer base over to Unix and market a unix client with applications. Did they? No, they pushed the tried and true server and the IPX protocol. That is what put them in the grave and the company officers that officiated at that time should be taken out and shot. This was back in 95 before Windows had any traction on the server side and was vulnerable on the client side.

One very important point: Windows server included a tool to convert from Novell to Windows. A lot of people who made the switch early on discovered that they didn't LIKE Windows server. Unfortunately, there wasn't a Novell tool to switch back. Stupid move on Novell's part not to create one, no matter what the cost.