Univel

Univel, Inc. was a joint venture of

Initial word that Novell and USL were planning a joint venture came in October 1991 with a memorandum of understanding between the two.^[1] Univel was then formed in December 1991,^[7] with public announcement of the formation being made on December 12, 1991.^[8] Novell had a 55 percent share of the new entity.^[7] The president of Univel was Joel Applebaum, who had previously been a vice president at Unix System Laboratories.^[9] Univel had some $30 million in initial financing.^[7]

The headquarters for Univel was in Novell's offices in San Jose, California,^[9][2] where much of the sales and marketing effort also took place.^[10] The main engineering office was in Sandy, Utah, where development work for the NetWare for Unix client was done among other components (there were also Univel liaison staff located at Novell's main Provo offices).^[11][12] Finally, there was also a small group in USL's offices in Summit, New Jersey assigned to the Univel effort, whose roles included ISV support engineering.^[13]

For Unix System Laboratories, Univel was its first foray into the binary, shrink-wrapped software product market.

Univel had only one product, the UnixWare operating system[10] (UnixWare was a trademark of Univel).^[11] The aim was to make Unix successful in a desktop computer environment.^[14] As such, the premise of UnixWare for personal use was that it would target the higher end of the PC range with a GUI-based, shrink-wrapped Unix that was oriented towards novice users that would easily drop into a NetWare-based local area network.^[15] In terms of sales motion, the product could then take advantage of Novell's large channel of 12,000 resellers and distributors.^[6][10]

Predictions that Unix could become successful on the desktop had already started being made by the late 1980s,

Part of the challenge of the "Destiny" project was reducing

Industry trade press reviews of UnixWare were generally favorable.[15]^[10] UNIX Review called it "an attractive product" with "a fair chance of capturing a portion of the desktop market", although it said the NetWare and DOS support needed to be improved.^[15] InfoWorld praised the "multilayered architecture that neatly supports multiple graphical user interfaces, several Unix file systems, and NetWare interoperability."^[10]

Sales were another matter. InfoWorld said that a significant market share for a desktop competitor would be in the millions of copies purchased.^[10] But in its first six weeks on the market, UnixWare only sold 13,000 copies.^[20] In April 1993, Univel announced a lowering of its initial pricing scheme.^[14] But that did not help; by August 1993, total sales were still less than 25,000, a number that definitely did not meet Univel's expectations.^[20]

End

On December 21, 1992, it was announced that Novell would acquire Unix System Laboratories, and all of its Unix assets, including all copyrights, trademarks, and licensing contracts.^[21] The Novell acquisition closed in June 1993; at that point, Univel became a fully owned subsidiary of Novell.^[2][22]

By one industry account, Univel ceased to exist in July 1993, when both it and Unix Systems Laboratories became that Novell's Unix Systems Group.

Efforts by other players to make 'Unix on the desktop' a success did not work either.[26] Years later they would be followed by equally unsuccessful efforts toward 'Linux on the desktop'. Univel is one episode of a complex saga of Unix and Linux history, including Unix wars, competing consortia, competing UI frameworks, competing desktop representations, Linux desktop wars, fragmentation, forks, forks on top of previous forks, and more.^[27][16]

References