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Seriously, NT Server TOP Server product? (TTChua) Mon, 16 Jun
Why NT Server is a good product (stu01) Mon, 16 Jun

And Why NT Server is not a good product

Posted by: kdenehy
Date posted: Mon Jun 16 8:36:10 PDT 1997

It's not a good product because Microsoft isn't marketing it for what it does well, they're marketing it for everything.

Overall, I think your post is very good, and demonstrates that the best solution is usually going to be a multi-vendor one in which, for any given task, the best solution is chosen.

My problem with Microsoft is that they're not happy having NT Server as a good application server in a multi-vendor environment. They want to replace the AS/400, and the Sun servers, and the VAXes, and the NetWare servers, and anything else that has anything more than a small piece of the pie. That would be fine with me, if (1) they did it with technical superiority rather than marketing muscle, and (2) if we knew that once they get the dominant share of all of these markets, they won't just sit on their fat butts collecting big paychecks for their mediocre, overpriced software (sort of like they do now with MS Office). The other thing that I dislike about NT is that Microsoft insists on using one code base for both NTS and NTWS. I think it's ridiculous that the server product has a lot of features that are not appropriate in a server - features that adversely affect performance and stability - for no good reason.

NT Server really is hitting the Small-Medium range business, and SOHO market. It's considered a viable replacement for Netware.

The key word in the above sentence is considered. I agree that NT is considered a viable replacement for NetWare, even though I don't agree that NT is a viable replacement. NetWare 4.11's file services are vastly superior to NT's file services. Heck, NetWare 3.0's (from 1989) file services are superior to NTS 4.0's in many ways. NDS has now been on the market for several years, while "Active Directory" is still vaporware. From what I've read, even when it is finally available, it sounds like it's basically just going to be a wrapper around their existing, circa-1986, LAN Manager style domains. Typical Microsoft. If you're familiar with NDS, you know that Novell didn't just put a wrapper around their binderies, as a matter of fact, NetWare 4.X servers don't even have binderies. They emulate a bindery for backwards compatibility.

The way so many small businesses neglect backups, I'd say NetWare's SALVAGE capability alone makes NetWare the superior choice for small business.


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