Back in the day, i was and are still a CCNE. Novell doesn't kill off your certification for the version you were certified under.
Novell If I remember correctly, didn't have a problem except for this. I remember Novell stock sharply dropped for some reason for a day or 2. During this time, the rumor of Novell going under was floating around. I was hearing this from the New guys that were Microsoft wannabee certified guys.
These guys pushed hard in our company to get Novell out and Microsoft in because of a corporate control issue. They wanted to control the environment and hence leverage their security in the company.
Out in the market, Microsoft saw this dip and applied heavy marketing and took advantage of the flux in the market in order to take over.
At the time, Windows NT sucked compared to Novell Netware. We were rebooting out MS servers every month or they would crash. Our Netware servers would stay up for at least a year without any memory leakages or problems. We had 800 plus users in the building and 6500 users abroad. Mostly we think about 900 users were on approximately 5 server. When we migrated over to Windows NT, we up graded all of our servers except for the primary Novell server and increased out server amount from 5 to about 20 servers. Not to mention, we still had to reboot all servers except fo the Netware server every month. The last I remember, the longest novell server stayed online was 377 days before rebooting and that was because of a system wide computer room shutdown.
I'd dare say if today, Novell stood were it did back then, Novell would still be on top,but, things are different now. Marketing
wins over the better product. Don't get me wrong, Windows 2003 (I have not used 2008 yet) is a great product. Much better than NT4.0, but, I think there is a lot of overhead and that darn blue screen of death gets annoying. Novell seem to have better control/isolation of apps. If something blew up, it was easy to remove. Just don't load it. None of this registry, go seek until you find all of he pieces of a program. Just unload (name or program) done.
Patches were easy to install. Just apply a patch to fix a problem or install a patch for security issues. That's all.
I don't know. what Novell would look like today nor how it would compare to MS win 2008, but back then, Novell was hard to beat.
BTW - speaking of old programs, whatever happened to Banyan Vines? Now there was a networking OS (Never used it,but, I heard it was hard to learn and robust)