The INQ guide to the top five Novell mistakes

I ONCE HEARD about a man who had had suffered a series of unlucky events in his life. He had an awful job he hated, his wife had left him for his best friend, his home had been broken into several times and he had been struck by lightning twice.

One day he wins the lottery, quits his job, hooks up with a beautiful young girl and eats his favourite Indian takeaways every night while watching a 40-inch TV. He died a few months later from a heart attack occasioned by his fatty diet and lazy lifestyle - the one slice of seeming luck in his life had killed him.

I thought of the poor fellow today while reading about the Novell-Microsoft relationship and wondering how a gilt-edged deal that brought it hundreds of millions of dollars could go sour so quickly. But to anybody familiar with Novell, its alchemical ability to turn gold into dust will seem pretty familiar. All of which is a long-winded and not entirely relevant way to introduce our Top Five Novell Mistakes.

5 Not merging with Lotus. Over a decade and a half ago, the pair had booked the church and honeymoon but at the last minute the wedding was off. A pity, as a combination of dominant network OS, strong productivity apps and the two best groupware programs on the market could have been a winner. Since then, Novell has been linked with everybody from IBM to Sun but remains out on its own. Rumour is that deal was stymied by religious differences. Lotus had no religion.

4 NetWare Lite. Windows for Workgroups was doing good business so, not wanting to mess with its full-fat cash-cow product, Novell boiled out the goodness from NetWare and offered this product to an unimpressed world.

3 Ever-changing strategies. Novell is the kingpin of network operating systems. No, it's a software one-stop shop. No, it's all about directories. Hang on, it's a network management firm. No, it's a security firm. It's a services firm. It's an open-computing platform provider. Wait a minute, that was Thursday…

2 Buying Digital Research. Novell had the dominant network operating system but wanted to own the desktop too. DR-DOS was a geek's favourite but its star was fading as the world and his dog moved to Windows 3.0 that, oddly enough, worked better with MS-DOS. Short of a clear strategy, Novell never made much of the desktop but it's trying again today with SuSE Linux.

1 Buying WordPerfect. WordPerfect owned a killer DOS WP franchise, a crack groupware product and some also-ran spreadsheet, presentation and database apps. In a fit of Gates envy, the late Ray Noorda bought its Utah neighbours for over half a billion dollars and set itself up in opposition to Microsoft. But Microsoft was a whole lot bigger and WordPerfect's Windows wares could not match its DOS strength. It wasn't long before Novell sold on WordPerfect to Corel for a fire sale price. µ