How Novell Netware lost the battle against Windows NT (2013)
Novell wouldn’t, or couldn’t, make Netware use task preemption and memory protection.<p>It’s a startling deficiency that killed its chances of becoming a general purpose server.<p>Without these things, the Netware server couldn’t be trusted to run independent applications.<p>There were some third party server applications built for Netware, I think maybe CC:mail server and Lotus Notes, but the memory protection and cooperative multitasking meant they didn’t last long.<p>I don’t know if this is true but I heard it was Drew Major who made this call, which IMO killed Netware.<p>The justification I heard at the time was that memory protection was too slow. Better slow than dead. I think Novell just didn’t have the technical chops to do it.<p>Also Microsoft was at the height of its powers as a competition killing machine and nothing that stood in its way survived. It really genuinely looked back then like Microsoft was going to wipe out everything and it would be a Microsoft only future. Novell was no exception along with Lotus and Borland and many others.