Of course that was a junior high understanding of software. But such odd views mattered. You could run Groupwise email or Oracle on Netware, but it felt off. You could write a Perl script and have it run in Apache and talk to sendmail on Linux. You could run a VisualBasic app on Windows and have it talk to Sybase and cc:Mail.
Maybe that VB app ran on a client, but the distinction between a client and a server could get blurry. Client-server apps became n-tier apps. Windows could do that. Netware really couldn't. Unix could do it amazingly. And not just Linux.
Redhat had this vision. Suse had it pre-Novell. Some people at Novell had it. But corporate vision is a challenge. And Netware was a champion. It is hard for humans to throw away the horse that made you a king and jump onto some other horse. Especially if you have to convince your customers to stay in your saddle.
It wasn't easy for Microsoft either. There was that whole OS/2 thing and LanManager and all kinds of awkward. The path forward was super murky for everyone in 1992. And Microsoft failed again and again against Netware.
But Netware really lost to BSDs and Linux as an app server. And *nix eventually lost to Windows as a directory server. By the time Novell got around to hosting their best-in-class directory server on a capable app server, it was too late. AD got good enough before anybody else put something as good as NDS on Unix. And of course, Windows clients had built in support that nobody outside was ever going to match as far as GPO capabilities.
All that said, history isn't over. The world is still waiting for a better client app server than Windows or Android. Or at least a better ecosystem. It isn't going to come from Redhat. It hasn't come from Google yet. There is room for a client OS with great Directory integration to take over enterprise computing. It won't be easy, but the right vision could pair with the right marketing to create a new winner. Funny enough, the biggest obstacle to that would be replacing AD.