In the meantime, Novell made several mistakes. The first was that a small group of developers, the so-called Superset, controlled NetWare. No one, not even Novell founder Ray Noorda, could order the Superset around.

Like many other techies, the Superset programmers were great at technology but didn't know the first thing about marketing. So for example, for the longest time, Drew Major, the father of NetWare, opposed a management GUI for NetWare. As administrators turned more and more to GUIs\ufffdthanks in large part to NT\ufffdNetWare, with its X:\\ command-line prompt interface, looked less and less current.

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The bottom line is that while users want improvements, they don't want radical change. So it is that I think Novell has a real chance to become a major server player again.

With OES, users can either use their reliable, improved NetWare kernel, or give the (to my way of thinking) better SuSE Linux kernel a try. In any case, though, the NetWare services they've known and used for years remain the same. Novell is giving its customers significant system improvements without forcing them to change.

I like this approach a lot, and I strongly suspect that Novell's customers\ufffdthe ones who are still with it, the ones who gave up on it a long time ago and the new ones to come\ufffdare going to like it, too.