Behind-the-scenes political manipulation by Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates simply cannot escape without further comment. In a conversation that I had elsewhere, the following interesting bit was mentioned.

Ray Noorda, God rest his soul, called them "Pearly" Gates and "Em" Ballmer, because Gates would dazzle you with visions of a technological heaven, and then Ballmer would stick the shiv in your liver at negotiation time.

As you may recall, Ray Noorda, the father of Novell, actually liked Free software and he never ever trusted Microsoft, which Novell is now dependent on. If only he was around the see the mess his successors had left.

Further to that comment above (courtesy of 'Linonut' again):

Except Noorda neglected one aspect of "Pearly" Gates:

Oh the shark bites! With his teeth dear! And he keeps them Pearly white!

Cue guest appearance of Jim Allchin, Platform Group Vice President at Microsoft:

"We need to slaughter Novell before they get stronger....If you're going to kill someone, there isn't much reason to get all worked up about it and angry. You just pull the trigger. Any discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger."

Ray Noorda, unlike Ron Hovsepian (with roots in IBM), was around to see anticompetitive abuse and learn his lessons about reliance on Microsoft. Jack Messman didn't negotiate with Microsoft, either. He had a different strategy. After Novell had struck the deal with Microsoft, Messman seems to have departed completely from the company. It appears like he never liked that deal, but that might be too presumptuous to say with confidence.