 Novell received a royalty on each card, but was no longer involved in scheduling and ordering manufacturing.In order to remain competitive with Novell's bargain-price cards, 3Com and other vendors were forced to cut the pricing of their entry-level network cards, contributing greatly to the networking boom of the 1990s.To a lesser extent, it is arguable that the success of the NE1000/2000 cards helped to tip the scale of the "LAN wars" in favor of Ethernet (championed by 3Com) over token ring (championed by IBM), though its main impact was to significantly lower the cost of PC networks.