Hi Paul
Numbers, eh? Now we're getting down to the wire! Last I heard, there were 65+ million users of NetWare in all it's variants, with over 22 million users of NDS. That's probably the reason that Sun, IBM etc are partnering with Novell on NDS, it's become a de facto standard and by integrating NDS into their environments, they can rope in those users.
With regard to monopolies, we probably have a different perspective over here in Europe that in the States. A lot of the time, we'll just take what the States hand out, as it were in terms of products, direction etc. assuming that it's "what the rest of the world use". I think it may be changing, witness the recent investigation by the European Commission into the Boeing-McDonnell Douglas merger. But by and large, the man in the IT dept. won't really know or care about Bill Gate's wealth, or MSFT's market share or whatever. They'll get told to implement the standard products - and a lot of the time those standards are decided by the US.
Products like BorderManager don't depend on having NDS in place to work, but they do gain significant advantage if NDS is present. BorderManager can use NDS to decide exactly who gets access to what kind of content of the Web. e.g. In a school, no student in classes A,B,C or D gets access to any site containing full nudity or racist content during regular school hours, but the evening adult classes E and F can go anywhere they want. That's controlled by NDS, but without it we can still work with a slightly simpler model (using Domain names, subnet addresses or whatever to decide who goes where). Again, it's the content of the directory that makes it attractive, providing security, desktop control, software installation, and the same kind of control over Internet access as they have over internal networks. So NDS is nice, but without it BorderManager can still work. Think of it as a black box cotrolling the gateways to the Internet with extra advantages for NDS shops and you're pretty close.
Regards
Peter |
