and go to Novell? I can only guess that money was a factor since
technology and leadership was clearly not part of the equation.
In 1995 it was easy to see that the only out Novell had was to embed
the Java runtime in Netware. The trouble with Novell (ok, one of the
many troubles) is that they move at a glacial pace. Plus, they promote
things with the excitement of clump of dirt. They should be creating
thousands of cool Java apps which would make people burn to get the
Java run-time on their netware servers. Instead they push InternetWare
which no on seems to understand except that it seems to have something
to do with Groupwise, which seems interesting. Maybe it's just me.
It's not hard to figure out why no one develops for Netware. Perhaps
Java can fix that. Or maybe it's too deeply ingrained in body Novell.
Novell should change the name of NDIS to LDAP. No one ever understood
NDIS anyway (despite the fact that it is reasonable technology). If they
did this and put a simple SMTP & POP/IMAP server (written in Java) in
every server, they could make a very good case for intranetting existing
Novell sites. Instead they will ceed the internet email cause to
Microsoft. My prediction is that all non-Internet email will be
dumped for standards based Internet (i.e. tcp/ip) based email. I love
what I can do with Netscape Communicator 4 and HTML. Microsoft email
never let me do that. (now if I could just get Excell to save those
charts as .gif's!)