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Microsoft Claims 3.3 million NetWare Migration Win 191

Posted by CowboyNeal from the working-the-numbers dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "For the second year in a row, Microsoft has waited for Novell's annual BrainShare show to start before claiming a huge customer migration win off NetWare and onto Windows. According to this article Microsoft says that there were more than 1.8 million successful commercial sector migrations in 2005 alone, and a total of 3.3 million customers migrated over the past two years. It has also launched a new program to lure customers in the education and state and local government sectors off NetWare and onto Windows." Novell's comments are enlightening about where they see themselves within the market.
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Microsoft Claims 3.3 million NetWare Migration Win More

Microsoft Claims 3.3 million NetWare Migration Win

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  • Welcome to 2006! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by XorNand ( 517466 ) * on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @03:30PM (#14966314)

    And in other news today: Apple smuggly announced that the iPod is greatly outselling 8-track tape players.

    I'm Novell certified and have (had) been admining Netware boxes for over a decade. But I haven't touched one in more than three years. NDS is worlds better than Active Directory, especially in a true enterprise-sized installation. However, the supposed debate is moot in 2006. Netware got clobbered like Netscape Navigator did. Too many software vendors have stopped writing versions of their products for Netware, and too many hardware vendors don't write drivers. I commend Novell for trying to turn their ship around and not resigning themselves to annilation. Their committment to SuSE is a very wise move, IMHO. So enough with the marketdroid strutting already. This hasn't been news since the last century.

    • you are missing the point.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @03:33PM (#14966346)
      these customers are choosing to upgrade to Windows, rather then follow Netware's recomended upgrade path (linux)

      • Re:you are missing the point.... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by frodo from middle ea ( 602941 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @04:25PM (#14966793) Homepage
        what I find strange, is any time linux/open source favoring figures are mentioned, they are stated as facts...firefox usage up by 2%, IE usage drops below 85%..

        And any time microsoft favoring figures are mentioned, they are mentioned as claims...Double Standards anyone ?

        I myself am a linux fanboy, and have no objection to the linux slant on /. , but that doesn't mean we should toy with statistics or facts to make our point.

        To the editors, whenever siting unverifiable statistical data, be explicit about the source and the reliability of the source and by reliable I don't mean linux favoring is reliable and Microsoft favoring is unreliable.

        • The difference you are mentioning is that it's not Mozilla releasing the Firefox stats, but it is Microsoft releasing their stats, and this is a *big* difference. They can also only be called claims when it is simply stated by Microsoft, only an idiot would call them "facts". However I can't stand most stats so I don't really care - only an idiot would call Firefox usage stats "facts".
        • And any time microsoft favoring figures are mentioned, they are mentioned as claims...Double Standards anyone ?

          No double standard at all. People don't trust organizations that lie to them. Microsoft is full of shit and everyone knows it.

          Oh yeah, people also don't like organizations that sue public schools and threaten everyone.

    • Re:Welcome to 2006! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @03:46PM (#14966464) Journal
      This is just plain stupid?

      Why leave if its better and cheaper to administrate?

      People wonder why Windows remains king over Linux and I think its corporate America's view that one vendor should decide everything for them as a way to cut down on costs. Meanwhile they are being robbed and price gouged.

      Have you seen the price of MS Office? What is Apple's office suite? $79?

      They get what they deserve. I just hope the rest of the world such as Europe and South America dont drink the MS coolaid as much.

      • Re:Welcome to 2006! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sammy baby ( 14909 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @04:16PM (#14966712) Journal
        Have you seen the price of MS Office? What is Apple's office suite? $79?

        Okay, wait a minute.

        Office is certainly overpriced for non corporate users. But iWork [apple.com] (Apple's "office suite") swings too far in the other direction. In its standard/academic editions, MS Office ships with Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word.

        iWork ships with Pages (a page layout / word processing app) and Keynote (their equivalent to PowerPoint).

        It's my opinion that you can't describe something as an office suite without a spreadsheet. But that's just me.
        • What happened to the AppleWorks 2.0 Spreadsheet?
          I had many complicated ledgers on that in 1984 on an Apple //c...It worked like a charm...I can't believe they couldn't have ported that to OS X
        • iWork is hardly Apple's office suite. Check out AppleWorks [apple.com], which does word processing, page layout, painting, spreadsheet, database, and presentations. Also $79.
        • I've got both iWork and MS Office on my Mac.

          I think iWork is a great app, but it's definitely not an Office suite - it's more a 'presentation suite'. Pages is template driven sub-DTP - it's way easier to create a slick-looking document than in Word, but overall it offers less functionality.

          This isn't a bad thing - the 'on rails' approach of Apple's iApps is great for some people, and the worst thing about OpenOffice is that it's had to reproduce every feature of Office, whereas I think the opportunity lies
      • Apparently new corporate methodology is to not only reinvent the wheel, but to rip out one's fingernails before attempting the process. It doesn't make sense why corporations would take what works and toss it out for something that doesn't work well, but apparently 3 million folks are learning that lesson first-hand.
      • People wonder why Windows remains king over Linux and I think its corporate America's view that one vendor should decide everything for them as a way to cut down on costs.

        I don't think it's that so much as what constitutes a "good enough" decision. A high certainty of "good enough" in many instances beats a moderate probability of "optimal", especially if eliminating the uncertainty takes more time than you have. And the bulk of people in your industry sticking with Windows and consolidating the old No
      • Office XP Standard (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) is $73 on Pricewatch, 2003 is $77.
      • People wonder why Windows remains king over Linux and I think its corporate America's view that one vendor should decide everything for them as a way to cut down on costs. Meanwhile they are being robbed and price gouged.

        I think you're wrong. It's all about the apps. Companies migrate to windows because the apps they need that used to run on *NIX and Netware only run on Windows now. Microsoft won the install base by winning over the application developers, and customers pick Microsoft because they have litt
      • The Y2K bug got MANY companies to realize the incredibly steep price of relying on obsolete software. After Y2K, successful companies realized the value of keeping their systems modernized to alleviate security issues, assure availability of hardware upgrades/replacements/service, and allow interoperability with newer software and web services. I don't know about all businesses, but mine can't get by with just office and a web browser.
  • This really illustrates how greedy Microsoft is. NetWare specializes in one little segment of the market. It's not enough that MS's crappy OS is on most of the computers around the world, they have to infect the market segment that Novell is currently parasitising.

    It not only shows how greedy they are, but also how they are just plain bullies. Timing these claims the way they did is just dirty. I know this is just business, but the claim is hard to justify:

    Asked where Microsoft had gotten those spec

    • Re:The MS thugs are at it again (Score:5, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @03:37PM (#14966383) Homepage Journal
      This really illustrates the greed inherent in the capitalistic model. It has nothing in particular to do with Microsoft. If Novell were cleaning Microsoft's clock, they'd probably do the same thing. Microsoft's only sin [in this case] is that they have ammo while Novell's clip is empty.
      • *ahem* How is it flamebait to explain to someone that capitalism leads to a certain set of common business practices? At least I wasn't marked troll, for once. If anything, the comment I replied to should have been modded flamebait, since it made (or implied) the statement that Microsoft is evil and Novell is holy.
        • There is such a thing as corporate responsiblity. MS consistantly lies - I liked MS until Win95 came out. At that time, I was a tech, and learned the MS reps (After not answering any questions on Win95 for months) avoided the techs, and told the sales people to sell Win95 no matter what the customer really needed. This sleaze, combined with the 'no more DOS' crap that any moron should have been able to see through, was just the tip of the iceberg for all of us.

          So when you defend the lies as 'everybody d

          • I disliked M$ long before Windows 9x. It began when I had to support Windows 3.1. This was long before I found out they lie frequently. Nonetheless I was talking about releasing figures in the middle of the Novell conference, not about artificially inflating them. We don't know if the numbers are accurate or not. They may very well be, although as another poster said, they may reflect conversions of tiny installations which are served more than adequately by windows filesharing, and as such are not really u
      • Greed is not inherent to the capitalistic model, making money is.

        There is a difference.
    • Its not about marketshare.

      Its about control and setting standards. Whoever sets standards decides who purchases software. MS wants to chose for the bussiness and not the other way around. Look at the damage the internet did by introducing open standards? It brought unix and Linux when it was beggining to leave the enterprise.

      This is "just in case Novel comes up with something in the future".

      Anything that uses NDS is out of the question since no ones uses it anymore and it makes sure any Novel future
      • Of course it is about market share. You cannot set standards and control things without it. There is also the matter of genuine innovation, as distinct from marketing BS claiming innovation. In a Wintel monopoly there will be little innovation because the main thrust is to preserve the monopoly. Fat stockholders will think this wonderful until someone else - the Chinese maybe - suddenly turns the tables and then we'll all be sorry. Imagine living somewhere where the only place you could ever eat out was Mac
        • "You cannot set standards and control things without it."

          Marketshare gains you little in the way of control unless you have the legal means to exclude competition. That's where intellectual monopoly legislation comes in and joins with marketshare to destroy any semblance of a free market.

          "Fat stockholders will think this wonderful until someone else - the Chinese maybe - suddenly turns the tables and then we'll all be sorry."

          No shit. Intellectual 'property' is our version of the soviet state factories, kill
      • Anything that uses NDS is out of the question since no ones uses it anymore and it makes sure any Novel future product will not hurt MS as much.

        Really? So THIS [cnn.com] is nobody? Look down at the lower right of the screen. What part of Novell do you think they run? Hint, it's not printer or file sharing.

        Oh, and it's not NDS any more. It's eDirectory. It's what LDAP wishes it could be (oh, and it's backwards compatible with LDAP). I have a client running Squid, authenticating against the eDirectory for su

    • Greed? No. It's called competition.

      Novell had no problems doing this to Microsoft back in the early 90's when Netware was king and Microsoft was desperately trying to network their Windows 3.1 boxes. Remember the thing that was called WfW? What a mess.

      Now that Novell has had the snot kicked out of it, Microsoft will continue to have no hesitation to do Novell what it has already done to Banyan Vines.

      Don't hate the player, hate the game.
    • Timing these claims the way they did is just dirty.

      Yes, because Novell has always played so clean and fair with Microsoft. What goes around...

  • You know you're old when... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mcgroarty ( 633843 ) <brian@mcgroarty.gmail@com> on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @03:32PM (#14966338) Homepage
    The first one of you Windows 2000 babies to say "What's Netware?" gets smacked with my walker.

  • I can tell you where (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Alcimedes ( 398213 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @03:32PM (#14966341)
    Novell sees themselves as dead. Because that's where they are. They won the war on the technical front and got handed their asses on the marketing front. At the end of the day the marketing front is (usually) more powerful. That means game over for Novell.

    • Re:I can tell you where (Score:5, Insightful)

      by misleb ( 129952 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @04:18PM (#14966725)
      With the exception of NDS vs. AD, Novell did not win on a technical front. I've been admin'ing Netware servers on and off for 10 years and I must say that the OS itself is rather arcane. The interface (console) is awkward and the OS is built on obsolete computer science. It uses cooperative multi-tasking and almost all NLMs run at the kernel level. So that a bug in most NLMs can and will abend (BSOD for you Windows guys) the server. Personally, I'm sick of it. I currently maintain 2 Netware 6 servers and simply unloading a module can either hang the console (requiring a reboot to fully recover) or cause some kind of critical system fault (sometimes and abend).

      That said, we're not about to migrate the servers to Windows. So we're kinda stuck until we can find a satisfactory Groupwise replacement. And I still like NDS. I am also a Linux admin, and so far I haven't found any good open or closed source groupware packages for Linux. Almost all of them that I have found maintain some proprietary user database. That just won't do. We need centralized directory authentication.

      -matthew
      • Samsung Contact [samsungcontact.com] is a really sweet messaging server. And it gets next to no marketing, as far as I can tell, which is too bad, 'cause it does all the Exchange-only crap that Outlook supports.
        • How does it authenticate users? Does it actually require RedHat? I really don't want to run Redhat. I'm a Debian guy. How about OS X support?

          -matthew
        • Why would you suggest they upgrade to an abandoned product [samsungcontact.com]? That'd be worse than sticking with Groupwise.
          • In my experience (admittedly a couple versions old now) it was a solid product that left little to be desired. Abandoned or not, if the sheep can use share their Outlook calendars and I don't have to use Windows + Exchange, that counts as a win.
            • And when something goes wrong, who're they supposed to go to for support? Enterprise email and calendaring isn't the same as hosting a couple calendars for your friends.
              • The same thing might be said of Exchange; I support a few businesses that have either Windows Small Business Server or Exchange on Windows Server just so that something less than a dozen people can share a calendar. I wouldn't expect them to get useful support from Microsoft for their problems either.
                • I'm not sure how many users the OP is supporting, but I get the feeling its more than a dozen or so. Even if it's not, I'd expect MS probably provides decent support even for such a small number of users, provided you're willing to pay for it.
                  • In the case of Exchange or some other product, as their IT Contractor/Consultant/Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, I would expect primary support tasks to fall to myself and/or my dedicated staff, rather than calling EnterpriseAppVendor at the first sign of trouble. I've supported all manner of enterprise-level products without ever needing to invoke paid support for them.

                    Besides, you're the one who brought up that "dozen" number.
        • Samsung Connect i.e. HP OpenMail i.e. Scalix. Stay away from it. Proprietary. Buggy as hell. In particular the Outlook plugin sucks... a lot. Hard to explain to out clients why THEY can't perform some reasonable Outlook operation. If you think you're saving money by going with this crock instead of Exchange - you're wrong. Lost a bunch of big clients due to this.
      • Protected memory [itworld.com] not working for you?

        I'd say the monolithic kernel of Netware *is* a little arcane. Novell has seen the light and is moving to put all their services on top of a Linux kernel.

        They are winning on the technical front, they just couldn't market water to a dying man in the desert.

        • Protected memory not working for you?

          Heh, never heard of it before. I'll have to give it a try with Groupwise. According to the Novell TID, there are a lot of restrictions on how and when it can be used. This only adds to the awkwardness of Netware. Kinda reminds me of my DOS days trying to free up "conventional" memory below 640K. :-P

          They are winning on the technical front, they just couldn't market water to a dying man in the desert.

          Which technical front besides eDirectory?

          -matthew
    • Microsoft puts out some FUD so that means game over for Novell?? This is NOT insightful this is trolling.

      • Re:Insightful?? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Alcimedes ( 398213 )
        The reason I say this is I've watched Novell lose out at our University for NO reason other than it's not MS. Novell can do more than the AD system they're trying to roll out, but they're going with AD anyway because it's the MS system.

        When we asked the decision makers why, it was because we're already paying for the MS software, so we might as well use it.

        It's sad. I'm not happy to see Novell going away, it offer tools that MS's AD doesn't, but it's gone, and gone because of marketing.

  • Microsoft bashes Netware during brainshare (Score:5, Funny)

    by GundamFan ( 848341 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @03:34PM (#14966353)
    In other news water is wet, fire is hot and rocks are hard. Our sources predict that soon Microoft will trash linux, stay tuned....

  • Welcome to... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by amcdiarmid ( 856796 ) <amcdiarm@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @03:59PM (#14966563) Journal
    How many migrations from:
    Windows 95?
    Windows 98?
    Windows NT 3.5?
    Windows NT 3.51?
    Windows NT 4.0?
    Windows 2000?
    Citrix Winframe?
    Citrix Metaframe?
    Citrix Metaframe XP? (really, what kind of bs name extension is this?)
    Citrix NetScaler?

    Inquiring minds want to know

  • If a prize fight, they would have stopped it. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by LibertineR ( 591918 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @04:03PM (#14966607)
    Not trolling, but come on?

    "Oops, there goes another customer."

    Reply: "Yeah, but we are better....."

    "And another...."

    Reply: "Yeah, but they suck"

    "There goes another......."

    Is it trolling to suggest Novell needs a new argument. If "we're still better" aint stopping migration, might a change of message be in order?

  • OK, but : (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mr. Funky ( 957139 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @04:03PM (#14966609) Homepage
    If you run ancient clipper-applications w/o source -and thus no way to migrate them in 1 or 2 mouseclicks- which use DBX-databases-ervers as the company I work for use, you'd better stick to Netware, connecting to databases using IPX/SPX is soooo much faster than windows.

    Now we have moved to an AD (yuck) things slowed down dramatically, and there is no way to improve it, because MS fsked up the protocol...

    Rumours go ppl@redmond did that on purpose when the Netware/Windows war _really_ was going on (ages ago) to show their clients how fsked up that protocol was and they'd better use MS TCP/IP and stuff.
    But remember, it's just a rumour ;)

  • I ONLY work here... (Score:3, Informative)

    by eaddict ( 148006 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @04:07PM (#14966640)
    Our company is on its way of moving out all our Netware servers and moving to a completely MS based environment. Sad to see us go that way. I have said my piece over and over but to no avail. Now all I can still fight for is Oracle on Unix vs MS SQL. We ever go that way I am going to have to update my resume. Our computer room is a nightmare with a bazallion Dell servers all running MS something or other...

    • Mind if I ask: Why Oracle? In my experience, most people don't use 90% of the features that Oracle provides and could probably get by just fine with PosgreSQL or, *gasp* MySQL 5.

      -matthew
      • Just a guess, but if your PHBs are dead set on MS SQL/Win, then a F/OSS proposition will typically be a no/no. In such a case, all you can do is point to a different commercial one (and it'd better be a big enough one) since that's the language they'll understand.

        Of course, in large corps this will have a lot to do with ass covering, too - MS is the 'safe bet' in such a case. Speaking of which, I wonder if the GP might have any success trying to push for DB2 and the old 'nobody got fired for buying IBM' lin
        • Just a guess, but if your PHBs are dead set on MS SQL/Win, then a F/OSS proposition will typically be a no/no. In such a case, all you can do is point to a different commercial one (and it'd better be a big enough one) since that's the language they'll understand.

          Honestly, given a choice between Oracle and MS-SQL, I'd almost have to go with MSSQL. Oracle is a bloated beast. Of course, I've never been much of a DBA, so I'd have to defer to them. Fortunately, I'm not in an organizations where PHB's make techn
          • Why? from a development/query/dbgeek perspective, it's kind of like this: oracle:sql server :: legos technic:duplo.

            While administration on Oracle can be a pretty fine-grained pain in the ass (as in, the rice is spilled all over and you have to pick it up with chopsticks, one grain at a time), actually working with it is fun, if you can get past the "railroad tracks" documentation. There are just some awfully powerful constructs (no, the hierarchy functions are not) that work quite well.

            It's fun seeing all t
            • Why? from a development/query/dbgeek perspective, it's kind of like this: oracle:sql server :: legos technic:duplo.

              Why? Because I'm not a DB geek. I have more of an engineer mentality. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is my motto. If I work with a database, I have very basic requirements and even something like MySQL will usually fit. Sometimes "duplo blocks" are the best tool for the job.

              actually working with it is fun, if you can get past the "railroad tracks" documentation.

              Another strike against Oracle in

  • Samba migration (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dtfinch ( 661405 ) * on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @04:15PM (#14966706) Journal
    How many users has Microsoft lost to Samba?
    • As far as anyone can tell, none.

      Samba may occasionally prevent a complete Unix->Windows migration in some shops, but it's not a sufficiently compelling product to cause migrations in the other direction.

  • Novell lost their touch (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rborek ( 563153 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @04:21PM (#14966757)
    NetWare 4 was probably the best thing since sliced bread... but they lost momentum (and everything else) with more recent versions.

    I work in a Novell shop. I'm a Windows sysadmin. My preference is for Windows, so I'm looking at this from that point of view - and I'll admit I'm biased towards Windows.

    Novell QA went right down the crapper in recent versions. Netware would crash multiple times per day when it was first set up (we moved from Banyan Vines) - it took years of patches from Novell to get it to any semblence of stability. The Novell client often breaks things with each new version - and it's a pain to instruct new users on the difference between a local (Windows) login and their Netware login.

    While NDS is great, the management tools for it absolutely suck. Novell went schizophrenic on the management tools - you have iManage, NWAdmin, and ConsoneOne, all of which can do some things but not everything, so you need 3 management tools just to manage Netware.

    Groupwise is absolutely hideous - the client is unintuitive and fell out of the ugly tree. Things which are easy to do in Outlook are a chore to do in Groupwise. Oh, and Groupwise didn't even have a flag in the client to indicate if you had replied or forwarded a message until ~2 years ago - I'd have to go searching through my Sent mail to figure out if I had replied to a message.

    Novell fumbled, and Microsoft picked up the ball - Microsoft went out there with excellent marketing, developer support (including hardware/device driver support), and incentives to switch. Microsoft didn't get it right with their first versions (Windows NT 3 anyone?), but they kept at it and kept improving the software.

    • I have to agree with all these comments. It's a shame, but Netware is a jumbled mess of stuff. The 'classic' Netware stack doesn't seem to handle the newer services such as Apache and anything running in Java very well. Processess can run away from themselves far too easily.

      It's all too easy to do things in Windows these days, whilst in Netware you have to jump through so many hoops to do the same thing.

      Having said that, OES Linux has something going for it. eDirectory pees all over ADS in terms of

  • It's a shame.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Himring ( 646324 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @04:30PM (#14966836) Homepage Journal
    I grew up with Netware. I started my career in IT with Netware 3.x. You could load it on a box with 5MB of disk space and very little RAM. It made one hell of a print server and file server. NDS came out, and quickly we began setting up NW4.11 servers. I finally acquired a job at a multi-billion dollar corporation with 10s of 1000s of users and 1000s of computers. NDS was a champ. Group policies were a cinch. If you wanted to do something at any OU level, you could imagine it and do it easily. You could set a login script or permissions from the top or at any place down, all the way to a single user. It was understandable, flowing and made sense. It happened immediately. NW4.x servers could run tons of applications and not miss a lick. We had 300 sites nation-wide with a mix of 3.x and 4.x servers.

    3.12 was a gem. Those damn things ran and ran. Only hardware would take it down. Most of the time problems stemmed around 3rd party backup software. Netware was never perfect, but to me it was as perfect as any NOS could be. People rail against Btrieve, but I supported it and never remembered it being that big a deal. We had 3.11 and .12 boxes that ran for years. The time they finally died was when the corporation decided to go to Windows and we turned 'em off. We had a running tally of the longest running box found. The winner had years of run-time on it.

    There wasn't a single, solitary thing wrong with Netware and no good reason, either support or money, to switch off it.

    We went to Windows. NT4 was liquid shit. The old Netware guys were boggled at why we did it and wtf management was on. They joked: "got an application? make another server." Literally, we had to build a new server per database, per application, per anything. For the first time we understood that you had to restart windows, so a priority became scheduling weekly restarts of Windows boxes for no other reason than to make sure they kept running well.

    As our IT shop grew and younger blood came in, we were hiring sharp, young guys who had known nothing but Windows. NT4 being ancient to them. So our main Cisco switch seemed to be an issue one day, and what do they do? They restart it. It turned out not to be the switch, but you can see their mindset -- restarting is what you do when managing servers. It's what you do with Windows.

    Active Directory comes out. We use it today, but it's improved little. I manage it ever hour, and am constantly faced with the awkwardness and inability to do things in it that I could easily do a decade ago in NDS.

    A server shouldn't have a fucking GUI. A server shouldn't need restarting. A server should serve data and services and that's it. It should be reliable. A directory service, directory tree should not need constant massaging and developers to create things that were built-in to another DS years ago.

    The last time I ranted like this, I got modded down, but that doesn't change the fact. Management migrates off of working platforms and onto Windows for no other reason than marketing....

    • Unfortunately, Netware lost a lot of momentum after 4.11. While NDS remains a champ, teh OS itself has steadily gone downhill. Netware 6 was plagued with horrible filesystem problems before SP1. The OS itself is terribly unstable because you have a million NLMs all running at the kernel level. Unload your backup software? Ooops, ABEND! Restart Groupwise the wrong way? Critical system error! Yeah, NT4 sucked and AD still sucks, but Windows as a NOS has come a long way. Win 2k and 2003 servers have much bette
    • "for no other reason than marketing.."

      Yes, I remember how you couldn't turn a page in a computer magazine without and ad from MS saying how much better Windows NT 4.0 was than Netware.

      But seriously, marketing had little to do with it. Netware had a near monopoly at one time and the market was theirs to lose. Many businesses found that MS's solution was cheaper and easier than Netware. Many companies at that time needed only the ability to share files across a network and that's all they used Netware for any
    • The last time I ranted like this, I got modded down, but that doesn't change the fact. Management migrates off of working platforms and onto Windows for no other reason than marketing.... ... and cash, summer homes, yachts, and weekend ski trips to Vale. As in kickbacks. In big companies, Microsoft pays off execs who make the decision to go from their competition to Windows.

    • Re:It's a shame.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Pecisk ( 688001 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @05:15PM (#14967193)
      And you know why?

      Because Highest management simply DON'T TRUST IT management, period. And I don't know a heck - why. Maybe it is because that what says IT management contraticts very heavily what is said by very polite, good looking marketing droid from Microsoft team. Maybe it is a little bit about that IT management usually can't talk a shit with arguments.

      And they are not talking about not letting personal feelings in business. Heck, business IS personal feelings, want it or not.

      Microsoft knew this all time along. And they have used it more and more for their good. They go stright to CIO, highest management, gets some dinner together. This is how deals are stroked.

      Not out of technical merits. Why? They are not needed. Because that guy had nice shoes!

    • Re:It's a shame.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by askegg ( 599634 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @05:30PM (#14967303)
      You are not alone in your experience. I managed Netware, Windows and Linux networks for medium sized companies for 15 years. When you use all the brands and models with an open mind you see the strengths and weakness of them.

      NDS is awesome, AD is aweful. Netware is stable, but a bugger to develop to (abend anyone?). Linux is stable and easy to develop, but lacks decent enterprise management. Novell dropped the ball on management (Console1, NWadmin & iManager?) - we were promised full migration to iManager over two years ago and we still aren't even close. Windows requires constant maintenance by the three finger salute army.

      Almost noone I spoke to understood why eDirectory was so good, and that's the problem. Novell were so caught up in the "we are technically better" mentality they fogot to tell anyone about it.

      Maybe SuSE will save them, but it a long haul struggle and I no longer care. I have escaped the IT department and work in another field. I purchased an iMac because it is easy to use and just works.
    • TCP/IP. I was a network admin at a place that rhymes with Brue Closs of California. They were primarily a Novell shop. Until Novell held out their IPX/SPX as the one true protocol. When applications didn't support it much anymore, we were forced to upgrade (After all, Unix is only for big-iron, right?).

      Incidently: One of the largest mainframes ever belongs to them. It has every California medical information ever. From the results of your Uncle Jimbo's rectal exam to your sister's emergency pregnancy
    • Active Directory comes out. We use it today, but it's improved little. I manage it ever hour, and am constantly faced with the awkwardness and inability to do things in it that I could easily do a decade ago in NDS.

      Canyou give some examples ?

  • Sure, they talk about 1.8 million successful commercial transitions. What about the failures? How many companies tried to switch to Windows and either went out of business because of it or ended up limping back to Novell or another platform? ;)
    • That's a fair question. The place I worked for had to migrate the VIPs to Exchange from GroupWise, because the #1 VIP wanted Outlook. We bought 40 of the Quest licenses - so the MS marketing team is probably counting them.

      But two months later, 95% of those VIPs hate Outlook and are begging to come back to GroupWise. You won't see MS announcing those kinds of losses.... ;-)

  • Novell have sounded as if they are for the chop for quite a while now so Microsoft's "triumphant" announcement isn't a great deal more than the equivalent of breaking into a hospital room and trying to roger the patient. Maybe Tim O'Reilly's next annual hoedown will be marked by Microsoft announcing that more Windows books are sold than O'Reilly sells open source books, so "therefore" O'Reilly must be no good? Exactly what are Microsoft so frightened of?

    Not many corporations make a habit of crossing the
  • Ford claims 20000 Horse & Buggy migration win.
    Segway claims 3 bicycle migration win.
  • Yeah, but will a windows server continue to work after being sealed in a wall for 4 years [informationweek.com]?

  • M$ = IBM of 60s (Score:2, Interesting)

    by glsen_az ( 672408 )

    Back in the day (well, the prehistoric computing day), IBM was the "Yes, sir!" company -- we're talking the 60s and 70s here. If you bought IBM products for the corporate server farm, you deserved a real, "Attaboy!", "Job well done," "Can't go wrong choosing IBM." It's this same kind of dull-thinking, clone mentality that is the mindset public schools are facing today.

    The school district I work in is stumbling toward Microsoft oblivion from our fabulous Netware systems. We pay a tad shy of $40K/year for un

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