“If organisations could feel grumpy about the past, Novell would
have the blues so bad BB King should write the company anthem. Here
is an outfit who owned corporate networking just at the point the
market went stratospheric. Netware was to servers what Windows is
to the desktop, and the company had an impeccable reputation for
reliability and performance in an area where nothing else mattered.
And they threw it all away.“It’s an open secret that while Microsoft was going through its
early and none too impressive experiments with networking–Windows
for Workgroups, anyone?–it lived in fear of Novell waking up and
sniffing the packets. But as the 90s wore on and the Redmond boys
slowly got it right, the sleeping Utah giant stayed firmly beneath
the duvet…”