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Novell's mission: to search out New Cheese


One of the hottest business books right now is Who Moved My Cheese?, by Spencer Johnson. It's a cute, well-written metaphor about reactions and responses to change. If everyone at Novell has not read this book by now, they should.

For too long, the folks at Novell concentrated on improving their own core product, NetWare. They shaped and evolved it into a lean, mean file and print servicing machine. Along the way, they enhanced its ability to run applications and gave it the industry's best directory services model, Novell Directory Services (NDS), now called eDirectory. Unfortunately, they gave a great party, but nobody came. Existing users became even more loyal, but very few other users were installing NetWare servers; instead, they opted for Windows NT.


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Novell should have won the network operating system wars. Instead, it has lost every skirmish fought, and the battlefield is littered with pink slips. How could this have happened? Simple: Microsoft fought back by not fighting back - instead ignoring Novell and acting as if Microsoft had not only the best network solution, but the only solution. In essence, Microsoft moved Novell's Cheese by creating a new business model based mostly on style rather than substance. To borrow a concept from Johnson's book, Novell had two possible courses of action to take: go look for New Cheese, or wait for the Old Cheese to come back.

Novell chose to wait. By believing Microsoft's success was temporary and Old Cheese (NetWare) was the best cheese, Novell expected users to rush back to it when they discovered that the New Cheese didn't taste as good. The problem was that these users had never tasted Old Cheese and didn't know what they were missing. New Cheese was all they wanted and they found it delicious, if not terribly filling.

Instead of spending all of its time proclaiming the superiority of Old Cheese, Novell should have looked for its own New Cheese. Novell even had some on hand: NDS was a great idea with sweeping implications for organizational management. Novell had the opportunity to literally reinvent network management techniques, but passed up promoting NDS when the time was ripe. The company's marketing types caught up to research and development almost two years later, but by then the damage had been done - Active Directory, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and X.400 were competing for attention as central repositories of network information, and NDS was just another proprietary way to do it. The moment had passed.

Now the chips are down, and New Cheese is desperately needed. Novell has promised a major announcement at NetWorld+Interop 2000. Is this the New Cheese that will take Novell to new heights and away from the virtually unwinnable war with Microsoft? We'll know this week, and you can be sure I'll tell you about it from a cheese eater's perspective.

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Shapiro is district technology coordinator for Kingsport City Schools in Tennessee. He can be reached at jshapiro@kpt.k12.tn.us.

Read more of Shapiro's Management Mode columns.


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