Novell from its inception was fundamentally a technology-driven company with a sales-oriented CEO. Like many such firms, Novell tended to regard its marketing operations almost as a problem to be managed, not a generator of opportunity. The problem was exacerbated by the position of the Superset within the company. This group consisted of a small group of elite programmers that had total control over the development of the NetWare kernel, the OS core, and it functioned almost independently of the rest of Novell. Over time, the Superset came to be regarded with almost religious reverence by the rest of the company, with Drew Major playing the role of chief pontiff to its small and self-governing techno-priesthood. You could suggest something to the Superset, but even Ray Noorda didn’t give the group orders. For years the members of the Superset weren’t even company employees.
One result of the complete ascendance of technology over marketing at Novell was that the company’s product management system was weak. Product managers had little ability to impact NetWare’s product development cycle. For example, for years the Superset ignored the screams of users demanding a GUI for NetWare. At one juncture Drew Major proclaimed that there would never be a GUI for NetWare, and for years, as Novell’s product looked increasingly creaky and out-of-date in a GUI-driven world, he had his way. Another clue to marketing’s weakness was its inability to provide compelling ROI arguments for purchases of NetWare and other Novell products. The company was good at developing long checklists of technical improvements to NetWare, but it made few attempts to tie these improvements to real-world benefits and savings.
Marketing’s weakness carried over to other areas in Novell, particularly its GroupWise products. A powerful competitor to both Outlook and Notes, with over 35 million users (an interesting fact that Novell was excellent at keeping secret), by the millennium GroupWise had a mid-1990s interface badly in need of updating. Novell’s product marketing group had known this for years but was unable to persuade the GroupWise development team to provide a modern look and feel for the product line.