NT, like love, is not free.
<<The first one is that WinNT, while in some aspects inferior, is free.>>
No it's not. It turns out costing more per user than NetWare, which usually serves three to four times as many users from the same box. If you consider the total cost of managing it, it costs even more. Much more. And costs associated with rewriting applications, which will be required to take advantage of advanced features in Win2000 (presuming they exist or ever ship) will also be considerable.
<<Often companies use winNT as a more stable version of Win95/98.>>
NT is a very different operating system from Win 95/98. As different as Win 98 and UNIX. It does, however, look and feel the same. While more stable than Win 95/98, it is much less stable and reliable than NetWare and many kinds of UNIX. The blue screen of death is a nuisance on the desktop, but a crisis on the network. The NT Workstation on the desktop is ideal for Novell, as ZENWorks (see Infoworld Prodcuts of the Year for 1998 in the recent issue) is the best way to manage NT desktop.
<<Once they buy the gray boxes with NT preinstalled it is easy to take the easy route and avoid installing Netware altogether.>>
If you think installing NT is the easy route, then I can't believe you have ever installed NT.
NetWare comes pre-installed on many of the same gray boxes that include NT. The user then cites an activation code over the phone and pays to have Compaq, Dell, etc. activate the operating system of choice. I've heard of OEMs discounting the price of the OS to sell big batches of servers, but this happens with all proprietary operating systems. Nonetheless, OEM pre-installs are only a fraction of NT Server and NetWare sales.
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