[nradov]

Besides the technical and functional weaknesses of NetWare, Novell also shot themselves in the foot by making the product hard to buy. As an end customer you generally couldn't buy it directly. Instead you had to go through an authorized reseller who would try to upsell you on a bunch of hardware and services. That made some sense in the early days of PC LANs when you had to plug hardware jumpers into network cards to configure interrupts but by the time Windows NT launched it was just stupid. Microsoft made NT easy and hassle free for anyone with money to buy and install, which tremendously accelerated early adoption.

[kjellsbells]

The advantage of Microsoft being second is that they could watch what VARs were installing and make very sure that NT would work seamlessly with that. It didnt take much for them to realize that, say, the 3Com 3C905 or the NE2000 NIC were far and away the best selling NIC in Netware installations, and that therefore they should make very sure that they Just Worked on NT.

I worked in Token Ring at the time. It was...less fun.