Toy,
I have trouble following your line of thought. You seem to think that because NDS is a superior technology to ADS (which I agree with), this will lead to an inevitable downfall of MSFT and the glorious ascension of NOVL. I would disagree with both preditions, and will deal with each (in reverse order).
#1: The glorious ascension of NOVL
This assumes at least one of two options: One, that sale of NDS will lead to significant direct revenues. Or that, two, widespread deployment of NDS will give NOVL the "power of Directory Services" and therefore provide leverage for sales of software/services that build on this "power".
First, direct revenues are not going to be earth-shaking. Directory services, by their very nature, are successful because of the ability to scale heirarchically, and their interoperability. This means that NDS is only able to lock in the top level of the pyramid/heirarchy if it is able to communicate and cooperate with the lower levels (via LDAP), which may be implemented in ADS or slapd. Therefore, the per-unit cost of NDS is capped by the competing implementations, and the number-of-units is capped by the heirarchical nature of DS.
Second, NOVL will never be able to leverage a potential domination of directory services. What are they going to leverage? NDS will run on multiple platforms, so you can't leverage Netware sales. NOVL has no clout in the client arena, so you can't leverage that. The only way NDS can become dominant is by exposing all its power through an open interface (such as LDAP), which would allow all clients (including Exchange and MS Office and AD) to take advantage of it.
#2: an inevitable downfall of MSFT
For the reasons given above, I can't see it. Even a domination by NDS would not threaten MSFT's revenue stream. MSFT owns the client space (MS Office). Instead, you should be worried about how MSFT will tie MS Office to ADS. I have not had a chance to review Office2000, but I would assume that their email client will work with any LDAP source. However, I wouldn't be surprised if other applications (Word, Excel, etc) communicated exclusively through the native ADS interface. This would provide significant pressure for IT shops to use ADS (vs NDS), all other things being equal (or even somewhat close to equal if you squint your eyes).
Conclusion
Instead of the focus on the technical merits of one DS versus another, I think it would be more useful to discuss what methods could be used with the dominant MS Office clients to influence control of the DS market in the future.
-Mitch |
