Novell

» see novell.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

novell touched the turkish corporate-IT layer right before i would have noticed it. by the time i was sitting in a CS lab in ankara around 2004, the networking class still mentioned IPX/SPX as something you might encounter in a legacy installation, in roughly the tone you'd use for an old steam boiler. nobody was deploying it. the protocol was already historical, the way coaxial ethernet was historical: a thing that worked for a decade and then quietly stopped being the answer.

but in 1993 novell netware had something like sixty-three percent of the network operating system market. if you worked in an american office that had more than two computers between them, the file server humming under someone's desk was running netware. the login screen with the red N was as universal in that era as the windows logo became later. novell sold the licenses and ran the certification program. the CNE certification was a paycheck for a generation of sysadmins. for a few years novell was the third most valuable software company on earth behind microsoft and lotus.

the company was founded in 1980 by george canova and jack davis in provo utah, but the netware-era novell was really the company that ray noorda built. noorda took over in 1983 and ran it through the years of dominance. for a moment in the mid-nineties novell looked like the only force in software that microsoft was afraid of.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

then microsoft shipped windows nt 3.51 in 1995 with built-in file and print services. you no longer needed to buy a separate operating system on a separate server to do what nt could now do as a default feature of the windows server you already had. by 2000 novell's market share had collapsed to the low single digits. the wordperfect acquisition in 1994 and the unixware adventure that same year had drained another billion in capital with nothing to show for either bet.

novell spent the 2000s pivoting into linux. it bought SUSE in 2003 and tried to position itself as the enterprise alternative to red hat. it never quite worked. the brand was forever tied to the netware era and the netware era was over.

~ the long tail ~

attachmate bought novell in 2011 for around two billion dollars. the netware product line was kept on life support for legacy customers but no new development happened. in 2014 attachmate itself was absorbed by micro focus and the novell brand was retired inside the micro focus product taxonomy. SUSE was spun back out as its own company in 2018. micro focus was then bought by opentext in 2023.

somewhere in opentext's product catalog today there are still descendants of netware and groupwise. they no longer say novell on the box. the red N is gone.

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