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You have to ask yourself, why would someone leave Sun Micro right now and go to Novell? I can only guess that money was a factor since technology and leadership was clearly not part of the equation.
In 1995 it was easy to see that the only out Novell had was to embed the Java runtime in Netware. The trouble with Novell (ok, one of the many troubles) is that they move at a glacial pace. Plus, they promote things with the excitement of clump of dirt. They should be creating thousands of cool Java apps which would make people burn to get the Java run-time on their netware servers. Instead they push InternetWare which no on seems to understand except that it seems to have something to do with Groupwise, which seems interesting. Maybe it's just me.
It's not hard to figure out why no one develops for Netware. Perhaps Java can fix that. Or maybe it's too deeply ingrained in body Novell.
Novell should change the name of NDIS to LDAP. No one ever understood NDIS anyway (despite the fact that it is reasonable technology). If they did this and put a simple SMTP & POP/IMAP server (written in Java) in every server, they could make a very good case for intranetting existing Novell sites. Instead they will ceed the internet email cause to Microsoft. My prediction is that all non-Internet email will be dumped for standards based Internet (i.e. tcp/ip) based email. I love what I can do with Netscape Communicator 4 and HTML. Microsoft email never let me do that. (now if I could just get Excell to save those charts as .gif's!)