It does not take long to realise that Microsoft fought Novell viciously in order to steal its lunch money. All the abuses, the technical sabotage, the lies, and the illegal contracts are a well documented fact. It remains impossible to understand why, despite Ray Noorda's opposition (and because of his absence), Ron Hovsepian was willing to sign such a terrible deal. This will be remembered as the event when Novell jumped the shark.

A post from InforWorld looks back at the earlier days of Novell and tries to realise what went wrong.

A single smart Netadmin could keep a large number of Netware servers running smoothly ... but Windows Servers required lots of maintenance and patching and defragging and periodic rebooting by less skilled people.

Manager pay scales are based on the headcount they supervise, so IT managers promoting their own agendas were motivated to get rid of Netware and bring on more Windows servers because they could justify a much larger headcount that way!

Novell's older products continue to suffer from maintenance issues, even this week.

CRITICAL: Highly critical

IMPACT: System access

WHERE: From remote SOFTWARE: Novell NetMail 3.x...

Novell should have remembered that the enemy of its enemy is its friend. It should have joined forced with a company like Red Hat, rather than join forces with Microsoft (its enemy) against Red Hat, which could have been its friend. Didn't they collaborate on code and haven't they thrived in consumer trust already? ⬆