Note: this post appeared on my ashimmy.com blog today as well. I think it important enough though to share with my open source subnet readers as well.
Many folks are sad to see Novell being sold off to Attachmate yesterday. I have to admit that when I first read this I thought Attachmate was the company that makes those faux leather calendar and appointment systems. But I was wrong. It appears to be a vessel that a bunch of private equity firms are using to amass what looks like random assets in IT. Besides the Attachmate core business which is something about secure transfer, they also bought NetIQ which had a pretty decent security business.
Of course you need a scoreboard to keep it straight on which private equity firm owns who in IT and security these days. But I digress. While some are lamenting Novell’s demise, lets not forget that it sold for 2.2 billion dollars. That ain’t chump change. That doesn’t even begin to beg the question of what exactly did Microsoft buy for 450 million out of this estate sale and how was that figured in to the pie. But Novell was still doing almost 200 million a quarter. That is a business.
But I am sad to see Novell go for another reason. To me Novell has been a dead man walking for many years. The Novell I will always remember was the Titan of the tech world. Back when I started playing around with computers Novell was it.
Most computers in those days were running DOS. Windows 3.0, IBMs OS/2 were options for the daring. I don’t think Apple had released Mac yet. Steve Jobs had not left the first time. All of these were fine if you were fooling around at home as a computer hobbyist. But if you were running computers in your office it was over a Novell network. There was no higher calling than being a certified Novell technician.
When you wanted to communicate via electronic mail (it wasn’t even email yet) or share documents, you did it over Netware. Combining sort of what Cisco has on the software side and Microsoft’s networking, Novell did it all. On top of this they practically invented the whole Groupware category, as well as LDAP. They seemed invincible.
So how did they let that all slip away? I remember talking with Microsoft guys when NT and Windows for Workgroups first came out (raise your hand if you remember Windows for Workgroups. It was the Windows ME of its day). They admitted after several drinks and off the record that the Windows stuff couldn’t compete with the Novell product. But it kept getting better and Microsoft pushed harder and it eventually replaced Novell.
It is easy to blame Microsoft for Novell’s failure. It seems that at every turn Microsoft was beating them to the punch, out marketing and even yes out muscling them. But Novell has to share the blame too. While Bill Gates and Microsoft were lambasted for missing the Internet Wave, Novell played Rip Van Winkle and slept through the IP/Internet tsunami.
Novell bought Word Perfect for crazy money after MS Office has already made stand alone word processing obsolete. They then tried to cobble together an Office suite with Quattro Pro and Word Perfect, but it was too little, too late at that point.
Finally figuring out that open source might be a way to compete, they made a huge investment in SuSe. While it enjoyed a level of success under Novell, over all it could have been so much more. The groupware stuff never seemed to break out beyond the old Netware crowd. Even the security IP they bought just seemed to die on the vine once it was grafted onto the Novell tree.
So cry not for Novell. 2.2 billion dollars is still a lot of money. But seeing how the mighty have fallen should serve as a lesson and wake up call to today’s tech giants that it can happen to you too!
