A short and quick post of something I came across today while scanning my feeds. Ray Noorda, the man who started Novell and the network computing architecture that most of us are familiar with died yesterday from complications due to Alzheimer’s-related illness.
The significance to me is that my first job in IT–and much of my exposure while at the University of Maryland–was managing Novell servers and the clients that connected to them. The numbers of Novell servers declined, but the one thing that Novell has always done correctly is technology. Although it has seen somewhat better days, Novell Directory Services (NDS, now eDirectory), was clearly ahead of its time. Microsoft’s Active Directory has much to be grateful for considering the ground that was blazed by NDS.
In the end, though, Novell’s decline can also be attributed to Noorda. If memory serves, it was his ill-fated acquisition of WordPerfect that began Novell’s slow decline, extending Novell to an area in which their expertise was bound to fail–competing with Microsoft on the desktop.
Originally observed via Gibbsblog.
Link to Network computer guru Ray Noorda dies at 82 | Reuters.com
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