Gartner: Will VMware become the next Novell?
By Tarry Singh at 1 July, 2009, 1:43 pm
While some comments there [including mine] were re-pondering over the Gartner ponder, I just couldn’t help wondering over the session I just gave on Smart Metering the Clouds about the “stupidity” of us people/humans and how we always tend to choose/make the “right” decisions.
History teaches us just one thing: “A distant memory of pain/defeat experienced by someone else does not have to mean that you experience the pain of the past.”
But what Novell and their clients loved was Novell’s technology, and the thought that anybody, especially Microsoft running that paltry LAN Manager product, could supplant them was heresy. Every year new products (or plans) were announced, and every year the fan club grew. But in the background there was a small chink in the armor, led by a commodity product that was available everywhere. Windows 95 was released to great fanfare from the media as a desktop OS but bundled under the covers was a TCP/IP stack and some reasonable peer to peer capabilities. Nobody really cared, especially the Novell fans (you can start thinking about hyper-V here, bundled into Windows 7, just as a heads up).
As more and more of those new machines came in with Windows 95, more and more companies began using this free IP stack and good enough networking as a departmental alternative to “enterprise Netware”, or in some cases as a departmental add-on. Novell announced Netware 4.0 with NDS (Netware Directory Services) and while an elegant product in it’s own right, nobody really cared. It became the Betamax of it’s generation – a great technology that was more complex (or complete) than most customers needed and the march towards good enough networking continued. It wasn’t until years later that Active Directory from Microsoft even came close to doing what NDS could do, but by that time it no longer mattered, Netware was on the long slide to Nevermore.
Related posts:
- System Integrators beware! — Novell cuts a $135 Million ERP deal with Dallas based ACS! System Integrators will have to really wake up and...
- Novell fires up Linux Virtualization with VMware The penguin gets some VMware lovin’. Novell today announced significant...
- Compellent certifies Novell Salt Lake City, Utah, March 17, 2008 – Compellent...
- Gartner re-does the math: Cloud Computing to top $150 Bn by 2013 I am totally confused how Gartner has done the math,...
- Why is VMware obsessively battling with Microsoft? This blogger ponders about the typical behavior that can lead...
- Novell has a plan: Unix to Linux Migration and Virtualization Novell’s Linux revenue is strong, growing 65 per cent between...
- Novell buys Platespin With the acquisition of PlateSpin, Novell will offer a full...
- Novell to hint on Windows Virtualization? I really have no clue what they are really up...
No comments yet.