Ray Noorda

The decision that made Novell was made by a man near retirement age about a company most people would have let die. Novell Data Systems, a Provo hardware start-up, had burned through more than $2 million of seed money from Safeguard Scientifics, its majority owner, and in April 1983 Safeguard installed Raymond John Noorda as president and chief executive. He was 58. He had spent 21 years at General Electric after a 1949 engineering degree from the University of Utah, cum laude, running what the Deseret News later called internal start-ups, then a decade at California companies. Before that: Ogden High School, Weber State College, two years in the Navy as a radar electronics technician in the Second World War, and a childhood as the third son of Dutch immigrants in Ogden, where he was born on June 19, 1924.

The same year he took over, Noorda backed a group of young programmers, the SuperSet team of Drew Major, Kyle Powell, Dale Neibaur and James Bills, who had been asked to build a disk-sharing system for CP/M and instead built a file-sharing system for the new IBM-compatible PC. That product became NetWare, shipped in 1983. By 1989 it held somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the network operating system market; around 1993 Wikipedia puts the share at 63 percent, with more than half a million NetWare networks and about 55 million users. Revenue nearly tripled between 1988 and 1992, to $933 million.

From 1991 Noorda's strategy was to get ahead of Microsoft in each market it might enter next, by purchase. The record reads like a shopping list, and the outcomes mostly went one way.

Bill Gates said Noorda had a "tremendous vendetta" against Microsoft, and Wikipedia records that Noorda supported the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust investigation of Microsoft in the early 1990s, the one that ended in a consent decree on operating system licensing. Around 1992 he started using a word of his own, coopetition, for the idea that a company should cooperate with rivals on standards and compete with them on products. Novell's board did not wait for the theory to work. Robert Frankenberg replaced him as chief executive in April 1994; Noorda left the company entirely that November, still its largest shareholder. Wikipedia gives his CEO dates as 1982 to 1994; his Deseret News obituary says 1983 to 1995, with more than 12,000 employees at the end. The 1983 date matches Novell's own corporate history.

Ron Heinz, who worked for him, told the Deseret News in 2006: "He used to give hugs to people on their birthdays." The same obituary credits Noorda with monthly all-hands meetings and a culture of trust built on knowing employees by name, and with the informal title Father of Network Computing, which the Utah press used freely and nobody else seems to have adopted. He was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, married Lewena "Tye" Taylor in 1950 and was later sealed to her in the Salt Lake Temple, and held the sort of congregational jobs that do not make headlines, counselor in a branch presidency and counselor in a stake Sunday School presidency, in an era when a Utah software company's executives and its lay clergy were often the same people. No source I found says the faith shaped a business decision at Novell, and I am not going to invent one. The honors came late and local: honorary doctorates from the University of Utah in 1994 and Weber State in 1995, the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1995. The thing that kept him busy after Novell was money, and where to put it back. Wikipedia says he set up the Canopy Group in 1992 through the Noorda Family Trust; the Deseret News dates the firm to 1995 in Lindon. Over roughly a decade Canopy put money into more than 100 companies, most of them along the Wasatch Front, and by 2006 the Deseret News valued the group at around $300 million. One holding, Caldera, bought the Digital Research assets from Novell in 1996 and sued Microsoft over the DR-DOS business on claims the FTC and the Justice Department had already worked over; Microsoft settled in 2000 for $280 million. Another Caldera purchase, in 2000, was the Unix assets Novell had sold to the Santa Cruz Operation in 1995, which is how a piece of Noorda's 1993 acquisition came back around to a Noorda company. He was not managing any of it by then. Alzheimer's disease and heart trouble took him out of Canopy's day-to-day affairs after 1998, and he died at home in Orem on October 9, 2006, at 82, survived by Tye, his wife of 56 years, and four sons.

Cooperate on the standard, compete on the product: coopetition, circa 1992.

Coopetition is the one Novell product from 1992 still in general use. Whether the word describes what Noorda did at Novell, or the thing he should have done instead of spending $1.4 billion on WordPerfect, is a question his own record leaves open.