Microsoft

Patrick Ellis patricke at uclink4.berkeley.edu
Fri May 22 12:12:39 PDT 1998


Brad wrote:


>But Microsoft did do three things: (i) try to sell at a relatively low
>price to a mass market in the hope that demand would be very elastic, (ii)
>pay very careful attention to backward compatibility--to making sure that
>your old DOS programs would work well under windows and that upgrades came
>smoothly and relatively rapidly, and (iii) actually write programs (albeit
>not very good programs) in a reasonable amount of time.
>
>IBM failed to do (iii)--and cratered.
>Xerox, Apple, and Sun failed to do (i)--and are now in deep trouble.
>Novell, as I understand it, failed to do (ii)--and is now in deep trouble.

You're right about the first two cases, but as a network administrator I would argue that Novell hardly failed to provide backward compatibility where it mattered and in fact Microsoft's network systems are far less compatible than Novell's (Novell's client products take into account the needs of Microsoft's servers, but Microsoft's client products provide only a weak subset of the needs of Novell servers). What happened to Novell is:

1) The Black Screen of Death created by Microsoft's Windows 3.1x network client's poor interaction with Novell's NetWare services, which Microsoft claimed was Novell's fault (despite general industry consensus that it was Microsoft's) for almost two years before suddenly releasing a fix almost immediately after Novell finally released a fix to Microsoft's problem. Novell got sucker-punched on this by allowing itself to get drawn into a prolonged finger-pointing battle instead of just writing the patch.

2) The tendency of the computer press to wildly trumpet anything "new," whether it is in fact a real advance or not, and particularly to herald the face of software over the guts. Novell's advances tend to be in subtle but significant technical areas that don't make anywhere near the press splash as a new GUI interface, and yet Novell's advances are true advances, whereas Microsoft's tend to be merely spiffier interfaces--with the release of NT 5.0, this will be the third major release of NT to sport a new interface, and from a server perspective, to no particular use. GUI's, btw, so far tend to make most common network admin tasks more cumbersome to perform than command line or menu interfaces. But the typical senior IS decision-maker is not technical enough to appreciate the quantity of bs out there in the psuedo-tech press & so favors what is written up as the next best thing--I can't tell you how many times I've had to do an analysis comparing NT to NetWare. NetWare still wins for file & print services in a homogenous environment, which brings us to The Big One...

3) Microsoft clients' continued poor functionality with other network operating systems, particularly (surprise, surprise) Novell. This is The Big One that sucks us sys admins in the trenches in. The primary responsibility of a network administrator is to make sure It All Works All The Time. Microsoft has yet to release a client for Windows that takes full advantage of Novell's directory services. Novell learned from the Win 3.1x BSD debacle & released it's own full-function client, but of course that doesn't install automatically with Windows and can be buggy with, guess what, Microsoft Office. So, you have to choose between not getting full Novell services, having an unstable desktop, not using MS Office, or running NT servers. Guess what a lot of folks are choosing--particularly in environments that include NT servers already and thus require use of Microsoft services that once installed on a Windows machine preclude even more Novell services.

Microsoft has clearly used its desktop prominence to undermine Novell's market position in ways that may not be illegal, but are certainly far from ethical. One can argue that Novell has hurt itself by not recognizing the non-tech realities of marketing a network operating system & Novell was also something of an IBM-like slow mover for awhile when it seemed to have unchallenged control of the market, but Novell's technical competence and compatibility are not what have hurt it.

Patrick, screaming as he slowly gets sucked into the Microsoft maw



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