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Novell Is Dead; Cause Of Death Is Lack Of Focus: Page 2 of 2

However Novell never properly capitalized on this instead trying to pitch NetWare as a general purpose OS even going so far as to rebadge it InterNetWare. VAPs and NLMs, the native NetWare programs, were always tricky to write and NetWare was a difficult development environment.  Windows programmers could use Microsoft compilers, remember that's where Microsoft started, and they always knew getting programmer support was important.

As far back as 1987 Novell programmers demonstrated an SMB NLM that would allow DOS, and later Windows, PCs to access NetWare server using their native file access protocols but that project never saw the light of day. Instead Novell kept developing bigger and uglier clients for Windows even after most users switched to the Microsoft NetWare client in Windows 9x.  Another blown opportunity was NDS for NT which could have brought an LDAP directory to Windows servers two years before the long delayed Active Directory if Novell execs hadn't insisted it be dependent on new NetWare servers.

But the biggest blunder was not marketing a NAS kit solution like Windows Storage Server.  NetWare was a good PC file server, and a better AFS (Apple File System) server than just about anything on the market. I'm not saying they could have been NetApp, but with a NetWare based NAS, they could have filled a significant niche that would have funded further NAS development.