AppWare, Corsair and all the other miserable attempts to beat Microsoft at its own game (Quattro Pro, WordPerfect) only made matters worse. Novell's proxy servers, caching and firewalls may not be such utter failures, but growth in crowded fields dominated by companies with better track records is just as illusory. Even successes like GroupWise, ManageWise and ZENworks are vestiges of 1990s thinking. They may halt a festinate death, but you don't build a company around them.

The sanguine Schmidt, then, has built Novell's future on NDS. And while directories may indeed be 21st-century thinking, Novell doesn't have many more two to three years left.

Six years ago, Bob Frankenberg talked in these pages of a multiplatform, standalone directory service. Five years ago, Art Wittmann, the author of this issue's cover story, wrote: "One of the best things Novell could do with NetWare is pull the directory service out of it, port it to non-NetWare OSes like NT and Unix, and let it stand on its own merits." Three years ago, we wrote: "Schmidt is convinced that once the dust settles--and the rest of the industry truly appreciates how difficult it is to develop a good directory--NDS will win. After all, NDS development began more than nine years ago."

Even assuming NDS emerges from the rubble, it may not save Novell. Obstacles abound. NDS direction is about as clear as an NFL salary-cap discussion. Customers can't tell the difference between NDS Corporate Edition and NDS eDirectory. (Novell told us these names would change. Maybe the company will call it NDS 8.)

Moreover, Novell puts all the weight of a Friends cast behind NDS. During the tedious creation of an integrated, multiplatform, production-directory infrastructure, our testers, Greg Shipley and Kevin Novak, were referred to the Linux NDS developer...in India; the Linux support guy was on vacation. We test a third-tier Microsoft product in Syracuse, N.Y., and we have to escape out side-door exits as if we were Britney Spears to avoid the throng of Microsoft representatives. NDS is Novell's strategic platform, and there's a single Linux support guy. Novell, do all your customers get to talk to the developer? Just asking.

Meanwhile, the market's reaction to Novell's offering has been as flat as Winona Ryder. A nine-year head start apparently wasn't enough to establish Novell's leadership nor to enlist the support of major third-party vendors--a continued theme in Novell's saga--by seeding them with run-time versions of NDS.

Novell is already extending NDS services, announcing DirXML, a Single Sign-On Bundle and NDS Authentication Services. But when it comes to building an e-commerce infrastructure, the company has all the credibility of an Olympic official.

Lest you accuse us of taking aim at Novell as brummagem blood sport, know that it is not a role we cherish. Most of us grew up on NetWare, and we'd like nothing better than for Novell to succeed. Perhaps that's the source of our frustration; sometimes our emotions run at Ring 0.

Greg Shipley put it best: "Novell needs to quickly give NDS some legs and then let it run away from NetWare as fast as possible." Question is, can Schmidt give it the road to run on?

-- Fritz Nelson, fnelson@nwc.com