Ray Noorda

Computerworld - Ray Noorda died last week. He was 82. The news didn’t even register at CNN, where the big IT industry story was Google buying YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. And on that one, the business deep-thinkers were baffled by the contradiction. How could YouTube possibly be worth that — YouTube, with no revenue, a major potential for big-ticket lawsuits and a pair of twentysomething founders running the asylum? Why would Google want it at any price, never mind $1.65 billion?

I think Noorda would have laughed. Not the tragic Alzheimer’s-ridden shell that Noorda became in his last years, but the canny businessman who baffled plenty of deep-thinkers himself — and who knew the value of a twentysomething’s ideas.

Noorda was a bundle of contradictions. He was an electrical engineer who quit his job at General Electric to become a management consultant. He turned around several failing Silicon Valley companies as CEO, but in his spare time he was trying to figure out how to wire together two small computers to make them fault-tolerant.

When he was asked in 1982 by a failing computer maker to become its president, hardware-guy Noorda wasn’t much interested in the computers that Novell was trying to sell. What caught his eye was a skunk works software project for networking PCs, hammered together by a trio of kids in their 20s who weren’t even regular employees: Drew Major, Dale Neibaur and Kyle Powell.

Novell’s management didn’t get this whole networking idea. But Noorda took the job, bought a piece of the company and launched NetWare in 1983. He was 59.

Within a few years, NetWare dominated the PC networking market, and Noorda was busy preaching another contradiction he called “coopetition.” Rivals should cooperate on technical standards at the same time they compete on products, he said.

And even with Novell on top of its world, Noorda figured it couldn’t last. By the early 1990s, Microsoft was making headway in networking. Noorda bought WordPerfect and Borland’s Quattro Pro spreadsheet to compete with Microsoft Office, acquired the rights to Unix to give a next-generation NetWare a jump start and even launched a project to commercialize a new piece of software from another twentysomething: Linus Torvalds’ Linux.

Once again, Novell’s board didn’t get it. But this time, Novell wasn’t a failing little outfit — it was a big company with a lot to lose. The board pushed Noorda out as CEO in 1994. He was 70.

And he still wasn’t done.

For the next few years, Noorda poured