| I think licensing was a huge factor in Microsoft winning. Microsoft's license was soft, and depending on the customer buying enough paper to cover, if you could even find a reseller that could describe how to properly license Windows Server (exteremely doubtful). OOTH, Novell's licensing was a hard limit. Once that # of workstations logged in, those without a license were hosed. On all the jobs I did in those days, Novell networks at each customer site _never_ had enough licenses to cover every workstation. There was always somebody left out and they had to go bug people to see if they were done with the network so they could get in their tasks. Nobody ever seemed to overprovision their licenses to cover every single workstation (or even to have extra). I never met a company using Microsoft server that properly had their CALs licensed, and they didn't want to hear it from me. Finding somebody to sell you the proper CALs was an interesting exercise. Most other network server OSes at the time (the Unix vendors were trying hard in this space in those early days too) also had hard licenses. Which was part of why they didn't gain traction at all. |
Every small business was going to be running Windows already, so an NT server was kind of a logical conclusion. Couple that with the fact that the NT server was likely cheaper to license (even if it was ultimately not properly licensed), and that the NT server at least offered the appearance of being more flexible and capable than a Novell server, and it made sense that NetWare died off.
As a reseller, I also seem to recall needing to have a bunch of techs certified on all the various Novell apps to get a good discount. I remember going for my Groupwise certification specifically so our company could get a better discount level from Novell to try and be more competitive. I think I only ever installed one GroupWise deployment.