Novell to Release 20% of Their Employees? 206
sicariusdracus writes to tell us that Ron Hovsepian, the new president and COO of Novell may have his hands full in the near future. Ron has been tasked with getting the troubled business back on track which many have speculated could result in more than 20% of the 5,800 man workforce getting a pink slip (although Hovsepian suggests that may be an over exaggeration). Part of the restructuring will be announced with Novell's fourth-quarter financial results.
Re:take the money and run (Score:3, Insightful)
I dunno about that... Not being forced to use Groupwise anymore may put you in the "far better off" category.
(Please not in the face! I do tech support for Groupwise!)
But seriously...
What if he fails to resurect Novell, he will be paid either handsomely as a saviour or bid adieu with a seperation package. Either way he will be far better than the pink slip recipients.
I think Scott Adams (Dilbert Author) had pretty good words about layoffs... (I'm paraphrasing this!) 'When they intention to make the company "lean and mean" goes wrong, it makes them "Skinny and Pissed" instead.'
CEO's think layoffs are the best way to save the company because employees are the costliest part of the company, but often those people were actually doing something (most of the time).
Think of the anology of you cutting off your fingers to keep from going hungry.
Sure it works, but over time you start running out of body parts to munch on.
Long term successful companies don't lay off employees, they find more revenue streams along with better business models and expand the business.
If you find yourself having to lay off employees, then you have to actually consider how you reached this point. Did you just hire too many people or are you failing as a company to make money? If you can't answer that question then the company is going into a death spiral and you best start looking for an exist strategy...
As for that, I suggest riding stock options by deceiving shareholders that you are actually making a profit by selling of parts of the company, firing more workers, blaming the previous CEO, suing other companies for IP infringment, and fancy powerpoint presentations.
Re:Act I (Score:2, Insightful)
From the article: "The layoffs will be more about resource allocation,"
Enough with this PC stuff. Why can't they just say, something like, "We don't have the budget to sustain 5800 salarys, so we're laying off X people."? There is something to be said for Candor from executives.
Re:Yesterday... (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone, including the financial backers, approve of the purchase of SuSE and agree with the strategy Novell is trying to implement. The problem is that they dont have faith in the executive management team to implement the plan successfully. They arent looking to scrap the company's migration to linux. They're looking at whether they should get a new management team to finish implementing the plan, or give the current management more time.
The article even includes a Linux success story at the end where a chain of fitness stores abandoned the patch-and-pray cycle of Windows in favour of a Netware on SuSE linux solution. Their I.T. manager says the move has saved them over $400k.
Even if you believe there's a conspiracy to keep articles that are negative toward linux off of Slashdot, this certainly wouldn't qualify as one.
that article is bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no way that their move into Linux was ever going to keep them going at their past levels. That's neither surprising, nor is it Linux's fault. You can make a decent business out of FOSS, but it's not going to be a cash cow like Windows or the old Novell.
I frankly can't judge whether Novell is executing right with SuSE. But the quality of SuSE as a distribution has been consistently high, and they have a good shot at selling to businesses, in particular in the European markets. I hope they'll make it, alongside RedHat and a completely free Debian; we need more and smaller companies, not a few behemoths. And, to me, the Linux distributions strike a good balance between compatibility and diversity.
'Release' the Marketing Department!!! (Score:1, Insightful)
I was at their huge 'BrainShare' conference last year, and the keynote address each day takes place in a huge convention center set up with fancy audio/video & graphics for 6000 attendees. With all the money they spent, it was the worst/most boaring event of the day each of the three times they had it. Their print marketing is horrible, their graphic identity (a bunch of black and white pictures of yuppies in wierd poses) and everything else about their marketing is just putrid.
As others have stated, their Identity management products for large organizations can't be beat. Their full fledged jump into being a complete enterprise linux vendor, from the desktop to the server room, is a great move. They just need to find a way to get non-novell users to realize this!
Typical classical management (Score:3, Insightful)
An example of this was when Apple was bleeding billions of dollars. They got rid of unprofitable products like the Newton, scanners, printers, Pippin, etc, and improved the Macintosh quality and features, until the company started to show a profit again. Of course they also downsized, but if they did things correctly they would not have to downsize. Keep in mind that they found new markets to be profitable in like music and video files, and the iPod.
There is some risk involved in doing that, but anything in business has a certain degree of risk.
Novell ought to see if Netware is costing more to support than the revenue it brings in. Sadly there are still organizations using Netware 3.X on MS-DOS and older Windows based workstations. If Novell was smart, they'd find a product or service to offer these organizations, or allow them to upgrade the Netware 3.X servers to a version of SuSE Linux with the Netware server application designed for the older servers, and then use SAMBA to connect to Windows clients as well. Perhaps Novell could make a deal with a PC maker to bundle SuSE Linux on their workstations and servers. Maybe make a SuSE Linux based rackmount server for web, email, IM, and other functions with some PC maker.
Anyway Novell ought to see what new markets they can get into, perhaps partner up with IBM/Lotus, Oracle, Sun, or even contribute to the Mozilla Foundation.
Re:Support _only_ KDE and SUSE (Score:3, Insightful)
This is just wrong. Yeah, the two sites you mention have similar names. But unless you can come up with a damn good reason of how they both are representative of the "excitement of its developer and user base" of KDE and Gnome, you're just astroturfing for mindshare.
Re:Support _only_ KDE and SUSE (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF?
Novell is a main contributor to Mono (very important to bring developers/applications to linux), Evolution (best Exchange alternative for linux), Beagle (best desktop search for linux), Hula, F-Spot, etc, all very important applications for linux that happen to be mostly built around gnome. And you suggest that they should abandon these apps and start working on KDE because you like it better and because some web site with kde screenshots happen to have more traffic that another one with similar name. I'm sorry but that's pure BS! Please stop trolling so bad because this is
I don't care about the desktop wars. I use both gnome and kde apps and the only thing that I care about is having great quality apps for linux.
Re:Mono (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what standards bodies like ECMA and ISO are for--they require specific procedures and disclosures when it comes to patents. Microsoft went through this, so we know they are committed to being compliant with ECMA and ISO regulations when it comes to patents and intellectual property. Sun chickened out when faced with this--they withdrew their standards body submissions over ECMA, ANSI, and ISO's requirements for disclosure and openness.
But I still worry about the possiblity of some of the technology being covered, either under a submarine patent (although I suppose at this late date this is extremely unlikely), or under a published patent where the applicability to the C# technology is not obvious to anybody but some devious Microsoft strategist. It may border on the paranoid now, but I can't help it. I know Microsoft is a brutal competitor, and I don't think they're beyond doing such a thing if they can get away with it.
The fact that there is a connection between Mono and Microsoft, however slight, doesn't make me happy either. But, in the end, what's the worst that's going to happen?
First of all, Microsoft can't claim willful infringement if people don't know about the patent, so there wouldn't be any penalties. And what damages are they going to claim? And damages are usually based on revenue, but who derives revenue from shipping Mono commercially?
If Microsoft were to assert a patent claim, people would work around it within a few weeks and the matter would be closed; it is implausible that any judge would even waste time looking at the matter after that.
Also, FOSS must be violating lots of Microsoft patents, at least on paper: the Linux kernel, Apache, Mozilla, etc. From a purely practical point of view, Microsoft must have done the calculation and decided that it simply isn't worth doing anything about it.
There are several so-called FOSS supporters that have licenses and intellectual property that constitutes a much bigger risk to the FOSS community than anything Microsoft has. Microsoft and Mono just isn't high on my list of worries.
Re:Support _only_ KDE and SUSE (Score:1, Insightful)
"Improved" at the expense of backward compatibility. Why doesn't ZLM 7 support SLES 8? I know the answer is that the required Mono version isn't available on the 2.4 kernel, but don't any *customers* still use and deploy SLES 8 due to ISV constraints? And after such a major re-write, why is the client command-line interface still called "rug"? It doesn't work the same way. It isn't backward compatible. It doesn't take the same arguements, or even use the same paradigms.
Please don't take this as the harsh criticism it's probably coming across as, but I was very excitied about ZLM 7, and I was very disappointed when I started using it. When a new system doesn't support 75% of your existing servers, and all your admins need to be re-trained, it sort of loses its value.