Microsoft has many, many enemies. Microsoft is threatened on the Internet front by Google, on smartphones by Apple, on developer tools by IBM Rational, on databases by Oracle, and on game platforms by Sony and Nintendo.

Yet the earliest Undesirable No.1 was Novell. Since the early 1980s, NetWare platform defined small-business local area networks. The software operating system was ubiquitous and reliable, but also expensive, difficult to create apps for, and required most businesses to use resellers and consultants to manage their LANs.

Microsoft saw an opportunity to offers a simpler solution, and Windows NT Server ate Novell’s lunch. Sure, Windows NT Server was less efficient and less stable than NetWare, but small businesses could manage Windows NT themselves (and that was huge) and could write their own server-side applications (which was also huge).

Write a Windows application or develop an NLM? Work with a NetWare reseller or buy Windows off the shelf? Use Netware’s IPX/SPX or use a network that spoke TCP/IP? Bye-bye, NetWare.

Since its long-ago NetWare-centric glory days, Novell has become a hodgepodge of technologies. It bought Unix Systems Laboratories and sold part of it to SCO. It developed GroupWise, an email platform that always seemed to have great promise, but which never could get a foothold and which was pummeled by Microsoft’s Exchange and IBM’s Lotus Notes. Novell also created Novell Directory Services, but that was taken down by Microsoft’s Active Directory. The company bought WordPerfect and created an office suite, but nobody even noticed.

Where Novell has excelled lately is with Linux, thanks to its purchase of SuSE in 2003. But jumping into Linux also put Novell squarely in Microsoft’s crosshairs yet again, as during that time Linux was beginning to make serious inroads against Windows Server, particularly for Web servers. The enterprise-class SuSE Linux was a much bigger threat to Windows Server than Red Hat or other Linux distros.

Now we learn that Novell is being purchased by Attachmate, best known for its mainframe terminal emulators and host integration systems. Okay, I’ll admit – I didn’t see that coming. Last week, if you’d asked me to name 25 potential acquirers of Novell, Attachmate wouldn’t be on that list. Heck, if I’d written a list of 250 likely buyers, Attachmate wouldn’t have made that list either.

Microsoft is simultaneously is buying intellectual property from Novell. The 8-K investment notification paperwork filed by Novell on Nov. 21 said,

Also on November 21, 2010, Novell entered into a Patent Purchase Agreement (the “Patent Purchase Agreement”) with CPTN Holdings LLC, a Delaware limited liability company and consortium of technology companies organized by Microsoft Corporation (“CPTN”). The Patent Purchase Agreement provides that, upon the terms and subject to the conditions set forth in the Patent Purchase Agreement, Novell will sell to CPTN all of Novell’s right, title and interest in 882 patents (the “Assigned Patents”) for $450 million in cash (the “Patent Sale”).

This raises many questions. It is unclear what those patents are – or what role, if any, Microsoft may have played in Attachmate’s decision to buy Novell, and if there are any side agreements between the two companies. (It’s unlikely that Microsoft would have been able to buy Novell itself, because this this would raise many, many anti-trust issues.)

It’s also unclear about what’s going to happen to Novell’s assets, other than those mysterious patents. Will Attachmate want them all? Will it sell some of Novell’s business lines to other companies (such as selling SuSE Linux to VMware, which appears to be a persistent rumor)?

Neal Sedaka wrote in 1962 that “breaking up is hard to do.” In this case, I suspect that Novell will be broken up into lots of little pieces. The big winner here is Microsoft, which will finally have seen one of its oldest enemies not merely defeated – but actually utterly destroyed.

Like many of my friends and colleagues, I’ve got two smartphones. One of them is an Apple iPhone 4. Oooh. The other is an HTC EVO running Android. Aaah.

Both of those smartphones are great to use (though it’s sometimes disconcerting when switching between them). Each is stuffed full of different native functionality and third-party applications that add to my productivity and are also fun to use.

But, like many readers of my blog, I’m not merely a consumer of smartphone technology. My 9-to-5 responsibilities include software development, IT management and business strategy. The Android and iOS ecosystems represent significant opportunities and unique challenges in each of those areas.

That’s where our iPhone/iPad DevCon and AnDevCon come in. We’ve created those events to offer you – and your colleagues – the best independent education available about those platforms.

AnDevCon, the Android Developer Conference, is coming to San Francisco on March 7-9, 2011. Phone/iPad DevCon is a month later on the other side of the country. Please join us in Boston from April 4-6, 2011.

Whether you’re building applications, deploying iOS or Android devices or managing mobile systems, these conferences are for you.

The workshops, classes and speakers for AnDevCon are already posted – go check them out! We’re still finalizing the program for iPhone/iPad DevCon and will put the session descriptions online soon.

Hope to see you at one of those conferences in the spring – or maybe both. After all, how many smartphones are you carrying around?

I don’t know a single software developer who doesn’t process a commitment to quality – and who believes anything except that he or she designs, writes and publishes solid, secure applications filled with clean, efficient code.

I don’t know a single development team manager who won’t insist that his/her team writes great software – and who would be mightily offended if you suggest otherwise.

I don’t know a single IT professional who gets up in the morning and says, “I’m going to do a really lousy job today.”

Yet software has bugs. Platforms have vulnerabilities. Applications sometimes don’t meet requirements. Systems experience crashes, Blue Screens of Death, kernel panics. Hackers find a way to penetrate networks, servers, websites, applications and databases.

Clearly there’s a disconnect. Thinking about the great Watts Humphrey (see “‘Father of Software Quality’ Watts Humphrey dies at 83”) got me thinking about these issues. I hope this news got you thinking about quality, too.

The challenge isn’t that our teams suck. It’s not that we write crappy code. It’s not that our architects and designers don’t care about security and application performance; it’s not that our programmers are idiots; its not that our testers are asleep at the switch.

We don’t have bugs because we’re losers. It’s not because we don’t use the right agile methods, or because we don’t care, or because we don’t use the right software suites or “best of breed” solutions, or because we haven’t “built a culture of quality.”

There’s no silver bullet. The truth is that writing complex software is hard, and our modern platforms and protocols are very complex. No matter how hard we try, bugs, inefficiencies will always creep in – and in terms of vulnerabilities, there’s always something we haven’t thought of. So, for any non-trivial application, we’l always be fixing and patching.

Let’s say it again: There is no silver bullet.

What we need to remember, and what we need to communicate to our teams, is that we acknowledge that that quality is hard. So what? It’s our job. We must constantly find ways to do better, learn from our mistakes, stay responsive to our customers and their requirements, and keep doing the best job that we can.