Ray Noorda, Former Novell Chairman and CEO, Dies at 82

Published: October 12, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Ray Noorda, one of the giants of the software business best known as the chairman and chief executive officer of Novell, passed away October 9. He was 82 years old and is widely claimed to have had Alzheimer's disease for many years.

Noorda was the managerial force behind the creation of a file sharing operating system that was eventually called the Network Operating System and then NetWare at a company called Novell Beta Systems, which was founded in 1981. Noorda usually gets credit for being the founder of Novell, but he didn't come along until two years later. But Noorda did get Novell focused on creating and selling NetWare, which is arguably the spark that ignited the server side of the client/server revolution.

Noorda had a big stake in Novell, and got wealthy from it as Novell grew. When Microsoft started coming on strong in the 1990s in the server space, first with Windows for Workgroups peer-to-peer networking and then with Windows NT for server-based networking, Noorda bought up various software companies to try to take on Microsoft on the desktop and on the server. He bought Unix from AT&T, Borland for software development and databases, and WordPerfect for office automation suites. The take-on-Microsoft strategy failed, and Noorda was ousted from the company in 1994.

After he left Novell, Noorda put most of his money into a venture capitalist firm called Canopy Group, which owned, among many things, Unix distributor and former Linux distributor SCO Group. This is, of course, the SCO incarnation that bears little resemblance (in terms of management and ownership) to the original Santa Cruz Operation. It is also the SCO incarnation that is suing IBM for breach of its Unix contracts and for leaking Unix licensed material into Linux.

It is hard to say how the IT business would look if Noorda was not ousted from Novell and had more time to see the open source movement and get Novell to fully embrace it. Imagine a Novell that caught the open source religion a decade earlier, when Microsoft was considerably weaker and there was a tech boom on the horizon. Alzheimer's disease took more than a visionary man in the IT business; it altered the landscape of that business--and certainly for the worse.