Novell's grand plan for the Internet's future
By Hiawatha Bray
Special to digitalMASS
Novell Inc. has kept a low profile of late, and it's been easy to ignore the firm unless it's involved in something rather cool or rather awful, or both.
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The awful part is the May 3 warning that the networking software firm would report only half as much second-quarter profit as industry analysts were expecting. The investment houses downgraded the stock, which promptly lost a third of its value.
Understandable; perhaps even sensible. And yet, I can't help admiring CEO Eric Schmidt's efforts to transform his company and the electronic universe at the same time.
It seems to me that Novell is going through much the same process that made life all too interesting for people at Lotus Development Corp. in the early 1990s. Having seen its Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet lose its dominant position to Microsoft Corp's Excel, Lotus badly needed to get into a new business. The firm's only hope was a product called Notes, software that made it easier for groups of people to work together over a computer network.
From the beginning, Notes was hailed as an impressive bit of work. But sales were slow at first, because few companies understood why they might want it. For a long time, businesses used computer networks for relatively primitive data storage and retrieval tasks. Notes treated the network as a tool for managing every aspect of the business. It took years for the idea to catch on, but today there are 50 million Notes users.
Novell is trying to pull off the same feat. There's not a whole lot of future left for NetWare, the network operating systems product that made the company's fortune. NetWare was born in the 1980s, at a time when Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system dominated desktops. Even for its day, MS-DOS was a mighty primitive piece of work, devoid of features that would let users link up multiple MS-DOS computers into an office network.
Companies like Novell and Westboro-based Banyan responded with network operating systems that would let PCs talk to each other. Both companies did well, because Microsoft didn't get around to adding high-quality networking features into its software until Windows NT came along in 1993. But from then on, little by little, Microsoft has carved off chunks of the networking software market. Banyan has thrown in the towel, renamed itself ePresence, and
now peddles computer services in partnership with Microsoft.
Novell NetWare still sells well, but for how long? Not only did it trail Windows NT in sales last year; NetWare even fell from second place. It was ousted by the free operating system Linux, which went from 16 percent of the market to 25 percent, according to International Data Corp. At the same time, NetWare declined from 23 to 19 percent.
Not good. But like Lotus, Novell has a plan. It just happens that the company is the leader in network directory services, an unglamorous technology that'll be vital to advanced uses of the Internet. A directory keeps track of every device connected to a network and every person entitled to use the network. That sounds as brain-dead simple as the White Pages until you think it through.
Imagine a large corporation, where everybody needs access to the network. The CEO gets access to entirely different data from the woman who runs research and development, and she doesn't get access to the data used by the man running the cafeteria. The same network provides all of these services, but the network must somehow "know" who gets what. In addition, each person should be able to sit down at any computer in the company, log in, and get
access to his or her data and services-and nobody else's.
You can do all this manually, at considerable expense. But to automate the process, you need a directory. Microsoft has finally created one of its own, called Active Directory, which is part of Windows 2000. But Novell's had its NDS system for years. It's been buffed to a high sheen, and is generally considered the standard to which Microsoft aspires.
Novell has figured out that the directory it designed for corporate networks ought to work well on the Internet. Indeed, NDS or something like it offers the potential for making a wide range of electronic services easier to use.
Imagine a database containing vital information about you, linked not only to the Internet, but also the phone system or even your cable TV service. You could go to any computer, any phone, any TV set on earth, punch in a code, and get your data files, your software, your e-mail, your phone messages, even your favorite TV programs. The devices would look up your profile in the directory and give you what you want. That's the kind of service Novell is
aiming to provide.
Obviously, such a system would need rigorous privacy protections. Novell officials speculate that people would store their data with banks, since most people already trust them with reams of personal data.
For a tantalizing, sometimes frustrating taste of the concept, I've been using Novell's digitalme. The name's too clever by half, but it's a genuinely useful free service that lets you keep personal data in an encrypted file on a Novell Internet server. At the touch of a button, you can use the stored data to fill out forms on various Web pages. digitalme can fill in the shipping information when you buy from an Internet retailer. You can also use
the service to store the passwords you need to enter various sites. This way, you don't have to memorize them all, or assign the same memorable but insecure password to all your favorite sites. You just have to remember the digitalme password. From there, you can automatically log onto your other sites.
Well, almost all. I found that the service doesn't work with a number of Web sites, such as eBay. And sometimes it takes far too long to work. But generally, digitalme offers a handy way to identify yourself wherever you go on the Net.
Microsoft has a service called Passport that does automatic sign-ins. But in typical Microsoft fashion, Passport only works with sites that have done deals with Microsoft. And there are desktop software programs like Gator that'll store your passwords, but only on a single computer. Because digitalme is on the Internet, you can use it from any connected computer.
Eventually, Novell wants to expand the digitalme concept. Your directory profile could manage your voice and electronic mail, for instance. Or it could include financial information so that you could use it to do banking and shopping online from a computer or telephone. I'd like to see it combined with some kind of biometric identification -- voice, fingerprint, retinal scan, whatever. That way, you'd never again have to remember a password.
With directory systems like digitalme, using electronic networks could finally become as simple as it's supposed to be. But so far, it's been a hard sell. Novell officials tell me that the chief reason for their poor showing last quarter is the slow adoption of their directory-based software products. A lot of companies just don't get it, but Novell's determined to bring them around. Here's hoping they don't go broke first.
Hiawatha Bray's digitalMASS |
