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Novell NetWare 3.11: Too Good for Its Own Good August 21, 2000 By Ron Anderson The idea of planned obsolescence defies everything I was taught growing up. The Protestant work ethic was more than just an interesting concept in my family. Completing a job wasn't the ultimate goal. Doing the job well-the best it could be done-was of equal importance. We've all heard stories of refrigerators being engineered so they last for 15 years and not a year more. If your appliances didn't break, you wouldn't buy as many of them during your lifetime, right? Did you ever wonder if the same business forces have taken root in the software industry? Are the bugs that haunt and frustrate us planned obsolescence? In a less sinister vane, do software bugs serve an important purpose in the software industry? I was thinking about Novell NetWare 3.11 last week while conducting some research for an upcoming review. NetWare 3.11 is one of the most stable software products I've ever had the pleasure of running. The stories among NetWare administrators about NetWare 3's uptime have reached legend status, and with good reason-servers on this OS just ran and ran. Administrators expected NetWare servers to operate for weeks, months and even years without a problem, and they weren't disappointed. But was this good for Novell? Microsoft Windows NT hit the market during NetWare 3's heyday and became Novell's first real competitive threat in years. Novell dutifully upgraded NetWare to fight off the onslaught but, by and large, Novell's customers didn't follow. Keep in mind that small shops with one NetWare server comprised the largest part of Novell's customer base, and single-server shops didn't benefit from Directory Services, the key ingredient to NetWare 4. Besides, why fix something if it isn't broken? Looking at a server that has run for the past two years without a hiccup, the thought, "By George, I think I need to upgrade that puppy," may not come to mind. Customer inactivity hurt Novell and Novell's large reseller base in the early 1990s, and NT gained ground. But what if NetWare 3 had been buggy? What if Novell had released NetWare 4 with promises of new features, even if its customers didn't need them, AND bug fixes that its customers did need? How many times have you upgraded software to fix a bug? It's a common practice. If Novell's customers had felt an urgent need to upgrade, money would have flowed through the pipeline and helped fuel Novell's fire. Do software developers hurt themselves by doing a job right the first time? Is it enough to deliver new features via upgrades, or do they also need to promise bug fixes to motivate customers to part with hard-earned money? Send your comments on this column to Ron Anderson at randerson@nwc.com.
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