Chris Holten wrote in a message to George Fliger:
 CH> Check out Novell's stock, financial reports and sales
 CH> relative to *anyone* else that is any possible competition
 CH> to Novell and Novel's situation will become quite obvious.
 CH> Apparently they got left behind a long time ago George...for
 CH> many good reasons. Probably the major reason Novel is
 CH> staying alive is that "networking" is a -huge- growth market
 CH> and novell still has a "niche" with a very loyal following.
 CH> It has changed, is changing, and will continue to change
 CH> very rapidly. Novell doesn't have the market or product
 CH> position nor the technical or managerial capability to even
 CH> stay in the ball park with SUN, DEC, IBM, MS, or most any
 CH> *nix (probably including the public domain varients). There
 CH> is still a lot left to shake out and unless something very
 CH> miraculous happens, Novell will probably disappear off the
 CH> planet within the next 3-5, at most 10 years, simply because
 CH> Novell is based on a dedicated NOS which is rapidly becoming
 CH> obsolete methodology and is not an integrated operating
 CH> system nor is it reasonable that Novell could ever develop
 CH> it into one that could become even somewhat universal enough
 CH> to attract any major software development for.
Several months ago, Microsoft issued a press release citing an independent 
research organization report to claim that NT was outselling NetWare.  The 
research organization made a public announcement, stating that their report 
had been misinterpreted, and Microsoft had to apologize.  The report said 
that NT was now selling more new installations than NetWare, where a "new" 
installation is defined as an enterprise without existing server-based 
networking.  In fact, NetWare continues to sell several times more server 
licenses than NT, simply by selling upgrades of existing servers and 
additional server licenses to companies which already have networks.
I don't claim to know what will happen in 10 years.  In 1988, would you have 
been able to predict the state of the industry today?
 CH> But it depends on what you are doing. Most of the 11 million
 CH> people using NT -certainly- aren't computer illiterate fools
 CH> George.
I find that decisions to adopt NT are made as a matter of corporate policy, 
often over the objection of the technical staff.  I have seen a number of 
these things go bad, especially when the technical staff was seen as a bunch 
of uncooperative whiners by corporate management.  In one case where I was 
involved personally, the IT budget had to be nearly quintupled to deal with 
the added hassles of an NT rollout that had no technical purpose, and which 
was done against the advice of the technical staff.
 CH> If all you need is a file/print server on a LAN with
 CH> cheep old 386/486 DOS workstations running mostly 16 bit DOS
 CH> applications (Point of sale, database etc), Novell is still
 CH> most likely the way to go. (But a decent Linux box with free
 CH> unlimited liscensing in the right situation could make a
 CH> pretty good replacement to a dedicated novell file/print
 CH> server).
Linux certainly has the functional capabilities, but the maintenance and 
administration can be significant.  You can lock NetWare servers in closets 
and leave them alone for months.  You can't do that with Linux, although you 
can at least administer it remotely.  With NT, you end up hiring a person to 
sit in front of it.
 CH> Anything beyond that, most any other decent
 CH> integrated operating system (Not just a NOS), certainly not
 CH> limited to, but including NT, will probably be more
 CH> effective and synergistic....but you have to evaluate each
 CH> setup. Anyone that follows blind rules ("Nobody ever got
 CH> fired by buying IBM" mentality) is going to be left as far
 CH> behind as Novell has been these past couple of years. It
 CH> seems to me that Novell lives on best where people figured
 CH> out how to make it work 3 to 10 years ago and are very leery
 CH> of making a change now. Many times that fear of change is
 CH> quite good (they know thier and thier companys limitations
 CH> and above all have sense enough to keep people using thier
 CH> computer system -productively-), some times it isn't. Above
 CH> all else, in a technical field one must keep an open mind
 CH> and abreast to changes and new ideas. How and when you
 CH> implement them is another story requireing considerable
 CH> judgement with my emphasis being that there is no pat
 CH> answer. 
OK, I'll concede that there is no pat answer.  However, I think you are wrong 
about Novell being behind on technology.  NT is still promising Active 
Directory, and it is still part of the Cairo upgrade that was promised for 
delivery in 1993!  NetWare has had NDS for years, which is very good design, 
and it now is even available for NT networks.  People who deal with managing 
networks in large enterprises, or even managing networks of more than a 
couple of dozen workstations, know better than to take NT claims seriously.  
What keeps people loyal to NetWare in these environments is that it works, 
and it works reliably.  You can get the same general sorts of capabilities 
from Unix and DCE, but not by typing "install."
 CH> In all honesty, I still don't have the courage to implement
 CH> a freeware Linux system in many places that I could
 CH> effectively replace other "commercial" network servers, very
 CH> much including Novell. That is another discussion, but if
 CH> one looks 2, 5 or 10 years down the road and at the *huge*
 CH> progress public domain *nix operating systems have made
 CH> these past 3 years, it really staggers the imagination.
 CH> Wouldn't there be tremendous advantages to using an
 CH> integrated multiuser system whose source code was public
 CH> domain and could be implemented on most any platform? Makes
 CH> you wonder just what and how many "commercial" operating
 CH> systems are going to be around after the milennium turns.
 CH> For sure it ain't going to be the way it is now, and
 CH> Novell's continued longevity and livelyhood depends very
 CH> much on making things stay as much the same as they were
 CH> yesterday and keeping Novell as much of a sacred cow as they
 CH> possibly can. 
We've used Linux in a number of commerical situations.  We use it in-house 
very heavily, we use it at our co-located Internet server, and we have used 
it as a file server in a number of installations where the situation accorded 
with that decision.  In particular, we do a volunteer maintenance job for a 
Catholic high school, which obviously doesn't have much money, and two things 
dictated our choice of Linux: the workstations already had ARCnet cards, 
which would have cost at least $20 each to replace with Ethernet cards, and 
we didn't want to have to pay per-user licensing if it could be avoided.
 
-- Mike
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