12 December 2001

Novell: From Godzilla to Gecko Do you remember when your office network was a Novell network? Way back then, their technology was ubiquitous, and for a long time they dominated networking and left a trail of crushed competitors in their wake. Then Microsoft released NT and ate their lunch. Here's an entertaining account on Software Market Solution of what happened and why: "Novell's response to Microsoft's relentless attack was to basically do…nothing. In this, it resembled those movie scenes in which one large Japanese monster is whaling on another downed Japanese monster that is not fighting back, just sort of twitching in place like a pinned WWF wrestler. Well, Novell didn't do ABSOLUTELY nothing. The company DID spend a lot of time telling IT types who reported to the CxO's that Novell used far less hardware than Microsoft. Of course, as has happened only about a hundred times in the past, Moore's Law made this argument moot and Novell's pricing disadvantage only increased with time." 12:17:57 PM