CH> The point being that you can have 1 years experience 30 times
 CH> are 30 years experience 1 time. As rapidly as it changes with
 CH> small computer systems, be keerful which side of that fence you
 CH> have breakfast on George or you, like Novell, might get left
 CH> behind.
 GF> Well, I certainly don't think Novell is going to get left behind anytime
 GF> soon.  You've been reading too much Ziff-Davis propaganda (and who
 GF> practically owns ZD advertising?).
Check out Novell's stock, financial reports and sales relative to *anyone* 
else that is any possible competition to Novell and Novel's situation will 
become quite obvious. Apparently they got left behind a long time ago 
George...for many good reasons. Probably the major reason Novel is staying 
alive is that "networking" is a -huge- growth market and novell still has a 
"niche" with a very loyal following. It has changed, is changing, and will 
continue to change very rapidly. Novell doesn't have the market or product 
position nor the technical or managerial capability to even stay in the ball 
park with SUN, DEC, IBM, MS, or most any *nix (probably including the public 
domain varients). There is still a lot left to shake out and unless something 
very miraculous happens, Novell will probably disappear off the planet within 
the next 3-5, at most 10 years, simply because Novell is based on a dedicated 
NOS which is rapidly becoming obsolete methodology and is not an integrated 
operating system nor is it reasonable that Novell could ever develop it into 
one that could become even somewhat universal enough to attract any major 
software development for. That is what is killing Novell and will be the 
final bullet in it's head some day, probably sooner than later. (They didn't 
even have the management, resources and technical expertise to fix a buggy 
word processor -- bought for 1.2 billion and sold for 77million--...how in 
the world are they going to keep up in the much more technical and 
competitive operating system arena?). 
 GF> Believe me, NT is nothing to write home about if you're insinuating it's
 GF> sooo much better than Novell.
Who is is advocating or insinuating anything about NT? 
But it depends on what you are doing. Most of the 11 million people using NT 
-certainly- aren't computer illiterate fools George. If all you need is a 
file/print server on a LAN with cheep old 386/486 DOS workstations running 
mostly 16 bit DOS applications (Point of sale, database etc), Novell is still 
most likely the way to go. (But a decent Linux box with free unlimited 
liscensing in the right situation could make a pretty good replacement to a 
dedicated novell file/print server).  Anything beyond that, most any other 
decent integrated operating system (Not just a NOS), certainly not limited 
to, but including NT, will probably be more effective and synergistic....but 
you have to evaluate each setup. Anyone that follows blind rules ("Nobody 
ever got fired by buying IBM" mentality) is going to be left as far behind as 
Novell has been these past couple of years. It seems to me that Novell lives 
on best where people figured out how to make it work 3 to 10 years ago and 
are very leery of making a change now. Many times that fear of change is 
quite good (they know thier and thier companys limitations and above all have 
sense enough to keep people using thier computer system -productively-), some 
times it isn't. Above all else, in a technical field one must keep an open 
mind and abreast to changes and new ideas. How and when you implement them is 
another story requireing considerable judgement with my emphasis being that 
there is no pat answer.
In all honesty, I still don't have the courage to implement a freeware Linux 
system in many places that I could effectively replace other "commercial" 
network servers, very much including Novell. That is another discussion, but 
if one looks 2, 5 or 10 years down the road and at the *huge* progress public 
domain *nix operating systems have made these past 3 years, it really 
staggers the imagination. Wouldn't there be tremendous advantages to using an 
integrated multiuser system whose source code was public domain and could be 
implemented on most any platform? Makes you wonder just what and how many 
"commercial" operating systems are going to be around after the milennium 
turns. For sure it ain't going to be the way it is now, and Novell's 
continued longevity and livelyhood depends very much on making things stay as 
much the same as they were yesterday and keeping Novell as much of a sacred 
cow as they possibly can.
--- Maximus/NT 3.01b1
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