Maybe in ancient times. Since 1991, the NetWare installation floppies were DR-DOS bootable and had DR-DOS's sys.com on them to make your server drive boot DR-DOS. People used MS-DOS on their servers because that's all they knew.
I was a Master CNE in the 1990s and I didn't miss NetWare at all after Windows Server 2003 came out. NDS (later renamed eDirectory) was better than Active Directory, but not by enough to cause problems. NetWare's big miss wasn't any a particular feature weakness, it was the fact that it was impossible to have a homogeneous system. Besides the desktop problem I already mentioned, there never was a database server worth a crap that ran on NetWare, nor a decent messaging platform. What IT manager would ever choose NetWare if it added another platform to support without removing one? If you already had NetWare, you almost certainly already had UNIX or Windows as well, so the consolidation question constantly came up. The answer to the consolidation question was never "let's ditch everything else and move all of our applications to NetWare".
So Novell bought SuSE hoping they could offer a total package to their customers, but they found that the market wasn't big enough to have two winners in the "Commercially Supported Distributions of Linux" category and they lost to Redhat. Right move, five years too late.
@powerlord said:Active Directory is an (arguably) better version of Netware than Netware was.
Nope. But being better isn't what wins markets. To this day it still annoys me that I can't give an Organizational Unit rights to something in Active Directory. NDS had far better capabilities for branch offices that really weren't matched by Active Directory until Windows 2012. But, it's still a better business move to buy the "inferior" OS and know that your print drivers will work on it rather than having a whole new set of things to learn for a second operating system, not to mention staffing Windows guys (which I need for Exchange and SQL anyways) and NetWare guys. Hardware is cheap. People are expensive.