Surfing the High Tech Wave
Chapter Beginning.
Summary.
The March Massacre of 82.
After the massacre.
Judith Clarke on Comdex 82.
The story the booth tells.
In 1982 the problems came right on time, but the solutions were a day late
or a dollar short. On Tuesday March 2nd Jack Messman came to Utah again.
This time George's head was on the block. He was cast out; there were layoffs
and by the end of the month half of Novell's founding management was gone
as well as half the company:
George Canova, Dennis Fairclough, Phil Long
Larry Edwards, Joe Maroni, Rusty Woodbury, Dave Geurarro, Craig Burton
In retrospect the March massacre was a necessary step in keeping Novell
alive long enough for the LAN product to evolve into a technologically
superior product. It allowed Superset the time to develop the software
to support file service instead of freezing development at the disk service
level. (file service and disk service concepts are covered elsewhere) But
in the short term it did little to improve Novell's prospects. In retrospect
the short-term shock too great for the organization to bear and instead
of responding by everyone getting organized and making a great leap towards
profitability, the organization fibrillated instead.
The people who had generated many of Novell's problems were gone, but these were the same people that had created many of Novell's solutions too. The problems remained, and the people that remained had to face them--but each had a vested interest in solutions he or she had already recommended prior to the massacre. The new situation just seemed to pile new problems onto the old ones. People from both sides of the Canova-Davis feud were swept out, and people from both sides remained. After the massacre Novell was a lot smaller as a company, but no more unified.
In November of 81 Jack Messman had a simple task: go to Orem and find out
what the problem was. The simple task received a simple answer. George
Canova, the President, said, in effect, that the root of all evils was
his relation with Jack Davis and if Jack was gone things would get better.
Jack Messman liked this simple answer, implemented it, and flew back to
Philadelphia with his mission was accomplished.
When he returned in March 82 the answers didn't come so simply. George was out; Jack Davis was out. So who was there for Jack Messman to listen to and explain this business to him? The company needed a president, that was about all Jack knew for sure.
What the sales force knew for sure in early 1982 was that status quo wasn't
going to work. Months before the massacre the brightest and most experienced
salespeople started leaving. By the time of the March Massacre only the
inexperienced and ambitious were left.
Larry Edwards was still in position as VP of Sales, but the sales force under him had changed entirely. Gone were the likes of Andy Olson, Don Whatcott and Winston Lee. In their place were people like Ken Radke, Roger White and Dave Geurraro. Larry had been a close friend of Jack's; he was clearly unhappy with Jack's departure and George's choice of an outsider to replace him. When George bypassed him, then Jack Messman bypassed him as well, it was time for him to find a new company.
Manufacturing was still being hammered about poor quality. The returns
and the horror stories of DOAs continued, but Joe came up with another
place to point his finger at: Sales. Most of the returns in the summer
and fall of 1982 weren't DOAs, he explained, they were evaluation units
that salespeople had placed. Accounting would call up to collect money,
but get a pile of boxes sent back to Manufacturing instead.
The mystery of the returns problem will never be solved fully, but that is the most important point of the problem. Between Joe's actions and the rest of the company's actions, the mystery never was solved. Who's fault it was was not as important as the fact that it wasn't solved.
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Timeline:
Dave Geurraro joins Novell in the spring of 1982 and leaves in the fall
of 1982. -----------
Dave was a short, energetic man originally from Guam. Prior to joining
Novell as the regional sales manager for Southern California, he had been
selling minicomputers using the Pick operating system. Dave was one of
the last salespeople brought on by Larry Edwards.
Novell's image in the computer community was changing. It was getting older; it was getting more widely talked about, but it was also known to be a company in turmoil. As result the kinds of people that were attracted to a "Novell opportunity" changed. The pioneering types were less interested; so were the careful types. But the ambitious and risk seeking types were taking their place. Dave was ambitious and risk seeking. He was also a talker and he'd found that talking and acting had advanced him further than his good looks or knowledge.
Harry was a surprise to the company. He came on board as a "metal
bender" to help Joe Maroni in manufacturing, and as such he suffered
much of the same heat that Joe Maroni did as the Quality Crisis evolved.
But rather than get defensive, Harry remained open and approachable. Harry
hadn't always been in production and in these days of crisis his people
skills allowed him to handle the fingerpointing differently than Joe did.
That by itself would have gotten Harry little, but in late 82 he started doing the exceptional: when production duties were not requiring all his time--which was becoming more and more of the time--he got on the phone and started calling customers personally and asking for orders. Word of this bizarre behavior quickly spread through the remaining ranks and reached the ear of Ray Noorda--who liked what he heard.
From his first day with Novell Craig had been a network spokesman. His
experiences trying to make real world things happened with some of the
pre-Novell LAN products had sensitized him to what was really relevant
to making LANs for personal computers effective. Reid Clark was the first
manger to get a hold of Craig and for the first six months of 1982 Craig
was overseas touring with Reid; boosting international sales.
This proved good for Novell. It kept Craig out of the fire while the worst of the cutting back and finger pointing was happening and it provided a valuable boost to Novell's international sales effort. By the end of 82 international sales was providing 40% of all feeble sales that Novell was able to maintain.
In the second half Craig transitioned from spending time abroad to working on improving the marketing of the LAN. He started grappling with questions of what was going to be said about the LAN and who had to hear the message.
All through 1982 Judy Clark grappled with the problem of how to become
part of Novell at all. As the company's fortunes declined she found more
and more opportunity to help out, but always on a temporary basis. By the
end of 1982 she was well known within the company and she knew the company
well, but she was still not a full part of it.
During 1982 the programmers that would become Superset were watching the
Novell crisis intently. They knew they were on to something exciting in
this LAN concept they were developing, but their vehicle for implementing
this exciting concept--Novell--was as shaky as they come. All through 1982
they watched it get shakier and shakier and more confused. But important
people at Novell and Safeguard had the LAN vision, too, so as crisis after
crisis roiled the company, these programmers were spared.
In the summer of 82 they incorporated as Superset. "This was on the advice of Dave Geurraro." said Dale Neibar, "Dave may have had his problems dealing with the rest of the company, but he treated us well. He told us that Safeguard and Novell would have an easier time dealing with us if they were dealing with an organization rather than a collection of individuals. So we incorporated, and he was right. Our negotiations with Novell and Safeguard went easier as a result."
While the walls of PC's, printers and terminal products were falling down around them, they continued to develop the LAN product. It was during this period that what would become Netware transitioned from being a disk server product to a file server product. It was during this period that Superset recognized that this server would have to handle more than CP/M files so they developed their own "universal" file format that would allow the file server to support CP/M, MSDOS and UNIX file structures. It was during this period that Drew Major first recognized the need for fault tolerance in the product. "I was talking with you [Roger] about some necessary networking features. The question of disk errors came up, and that got me to thinking." About the only basic Netware architecture concept in Netware 2x or 3x that waited until 1983 to be introduced was hardware independence.
In early 1982 Drew Major hustled out of Computerland in Orem carrying one
of the first IBM PCs. He was one of the first in a long line of personal
computer software developers who wanted to see what IBM had wrought. His
burning question: would this be a good platform to act as a LAN server?
He and the rest of Superset spent the year toying with it to find out.
The original floppy-disk based PC wasn't suitable but the PCXT with it's
hard disk had potential. That finding brought Novell to one of its 1983
crossroads: should Novell continue developing dedicated file servers based
on the 68000 or should it develop an 8088-based version of Netware that
could use an IBM PCXT as the file server?
Chapter Beginning.
Summary.
The March Massacre of 82.
After the massacre.
Judith Clarke on Comdex 82.
The story the booth tells.