Nov
19
Most people have always had a sneaking love for those cheesy Japanese movies in which vast areas of Tokyo were always being subjected to large-scale urban renewal via the efforts of a huge, irradiated prehistoric creature with a bad attitude.
The undisputed king of the Japanese movie monsters was always Godzilla. Anyone who messed with this supercharged lizard that liked to spit radioactive phlegm was guaranteed a bad day. In various encounters he squashed Mothra the Giant Bug, blew away the Smog Monster, pulled the wings off of Rodan the Giant Pterosaur (or whatever), and kicked King Kong’s giant chimp butt. (Yeah, yeah, in the version shown in America the monkey wins, but in the real version shown in Japan, Kong gets a face full of nuclear halitosis and goes down for the count.) He never even paid attention to the plastic tanks and model airplanes the Japanese army threw against him.
Novell was once like that. The company started off its life in 1979 as Novell Data Systems, a Utah-based computer manufacturer and developer of proprietary disk operating systems. Its main offering, Sharenet, was a very expensive proprietary mix of hardware and software, and Novell had little success in selling it. By 1983, Novell was on the verge of collapse, but before the lights were turned off for the last time, the company brought in one of its investors, a gentleman by the name of Ray Noorda, to see if anything could be salvaged from the mess. Noorda was not a technologist, but he was a shrewd businessman with an eye for value and an almost pathological focus on keeping costs down.
After poking about a bit, Noorda focused on the network operating system (NOS) that was Sharenet’s software heart and decided Novell’s redemption lay in this product. The NOS, soon to be christened “NetWare,” was the pet project of the “Superset”: a small group of contractors led by Drew Major and hired by Novell. It would serve as the foundation for what would become, for over a decade, one of the industry’s most powerful and influential companies.
NetWare’s unique value was in how it allowed users to share files and resources on a network of connected PCs. Prior to NetWare’s creation, competing NOSs for the PC market from companies such as 3Com simply partitioned a server (the remote computer on which the NOS ran) into virtual drives. You could store files remotely, but they were inaccessible to others. NetWare was far more sophisticated. The remote hard disk was treated as a common resource available to all users of the network. Individual users were granted rights to subdirectories on the server, and if the user had permission from the network administrator, he could easily transfer files across the network to others. In addition to its file-sharing capabilities, NetWare also made it easy for multiple users to share printers, an important issue in an era when a primitive dot-matrix unit cost about $600.00.
Another strength of NetWare was its independence of any particular vendor’s hardware. NetWare could run over ARCnet, Ethernet, or Token Ring. Most of its competitors were tied to specific LAN types or LAN adapters. To communicate between the server and the desktop PC, the company relied on its proprietary Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX) protocol. For a brief period in high-tech history, IPX became the de facto industry standard for network protocols. This would change as the Internet and TCP/IP gathered momentum in the 1990s.
Noorda initially offered his new NOS to some of the major players in the industry, most notably 3Com. Headed up by Robert Metcalfe, the coinventor of Ethernet, 3Com was the early leader in the NOS and networking environment. In a meeting at COMDEX in 1982, one that typifies the friendly, hail-fellow-well-met attitude so prevalent in high tech, Metcalfe threw Noorda out of the 3Com booth. Metcalfe’s reward for his intelligent behavior was to help ensure 3Com’s eventual departure from the NOS market.
From this inauspicious beginning, Novell soon bulked up to become the Godzilla of PC networking. In a brilliant marketing move that could have been thought up by Bill Gates, Novell bought several network interface card (NIC) vendors and helped drive hardware prices down. Having ruined margins for several companies but expanded the market for NetWare, Novell dumped most of its hardware business to focus on its OS.
By 1987, Novell was the baddest of the bad in the NOS arena. NetWare crushed Corvus, another early market leader in the industry. Plucked Banyan’s VINES. Body slammed 3Com. Kicked sand in the face of Microsoft’s LAN Manager and IBM’s LAN Server. From the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, Novell’s dominance in LANs and NOSs was unchallenged.
Playing to its strengths, Novell also established itself as a major player in the “groupware” category with GroupWise. Noorda also drove the development of Novell’s reseller education and certification programs, and made a Certified Novell Engineer (CNE) certificate the most valuable networking designation in the industry from 1985 to 1995. Novell’s CNE program was widely admired and copied in the industry. When Microsoft rolled out Windows NT, it made no secret of the fact that its Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) training regimen was based on Novell’s program. The company was big, powerful, and profitable. By 1994, yearly revenue exceeded $2 billion at “Big Red.”
And then, just like in a Japanese movie, a nerd with glasses and a questionable haircut developed an incredible radioactive shrinking ray and turned it on the rampaging monster. When the ray had wreaked its incredible effect, the beast had been shrunk to gecko-like proportions.
To add insult to injury, the nerd didn’t even bother to reach for a tank or a missile or a jet to apply the coup de grace to our miniaturized monster.
He used a cereal box.
Comments
Leave a Reply