Network Computing - December 1/96
Netware, Solaris, NT and OS/2 Warp all get the same rating...C+. In
other words, the author of the article, Jay Milne considers all four to be of equal calibre.
On NetWare 4.x:
"....One of Novell's biggest hurdles has been its inability to get ISVs to jump on the NDS bandwagon and fully exploit the capabilities of NDS. This can be traced to several events. First, customers did not implement NDS right away and Novell was not as aggressive in selling NDS as a viable solution as it should have been. In addition, NetWare 4.0 was not as completea as it could have been. Compared with MSFT and IBM's domain technologies, NDS is quite superior. Although Banyan's StreetTalk competes on a technical level, StreeTalk has not taken off.
Even more frustrating, Novell has not been able to make its own applications fully NDS aware. Groupwise, NOVL's flagship messaging product, has only the most basic integration with NDS, and maintains a secondary directory of its own performance reasons. Only now are we seeing products and technology that exploit NDS...... Few companies are looking at Inratnetware as the platform to host their mission-critical applications. This remains a substanial problem with
NetWare that must be addressed. Novell's lack of action in the past several years allowed MSFT to take a stronghold in large corporations."
In a meeting with my boss last week, here is what I said on his concerns about the future of NOVL:
My response: "The product NetWare will survive and there is no question about that in my mind. Technically speaking, it is a better O/S than NT 4.0 although I can not comment with NT 5.x at this time. However, the company may not survive as an independent. A stronger partner with deep pockets such as IBM, Oracle etc... will probably buy out the company."
His reponse: If IBM buys out Novell, thats it for NetWare in this company. We might as well go NT all the way. I prefer WordPerfect over Word and look whats happened to WordPerfect...gone. I also prefer OS/2 over Nt and NW and it did not take off so why should I gamble on NetWare ?"
My response: "Yep. Perception drives this market".
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