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3Com’s Three Losing Bets Against Novell

by mark | Leave a comment

I ran across this article written by Bob Metcalfe in 1991 about 3Com’s losing bets against Novell. This contained an important fact in our research about Ethernet development in the 1980s.

To summarize the article, those losing bets were:

  • Network Operating System: Novell’s NetWare became “one of the PC software blockbusters of all time” and market share far surpassed 3Com’s second network operating system, EtherSeries
  • Declaring war against Novell, 3com stopped selling EtherLink (NICs) through Novell.. this led NetWare customers to consider buying NICs from 3Com’s competitors
  • Betting Against Novell, on Microsoft: 3Com joined the LAN Manager alliance with IBM and Microsoft (which dovetails into OS/2), which was ultimately a failure.

Thanks to David Strom who originally posted scans of this on his Happy 40th birthday, Ethernet blog post in 2013

met1Download
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