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TurboLinux Files for IPO
websensei
noted that Turbo Linux has filed for an IPO. As someone who has been through this, good luck to you guys: I hope only the best for all the companies doing the Linux thing: Turbo Linux has huge market share (although not as much in the U.S.) so they have a good shot. The press release doesn't give any interesting information (number of shares or pricing) but thats normal for this stage in the process.
(side note for Hemos and CmdrTaco: "So if stock stories never make it to Slashdot, then what the hell is this one doing here?")
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Linux Weekly News has a pretty good analysis of their filing up. You can find it here.
Enjoy...
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
You know maybe it's just me, but haven't all of the companies that made such good IPOs last year pretty much bombed out of the market? And recent IPOs haven't exactly managed to inject any sparkle into the Linux market - investors are finally beginning to realise that open source makes good software, not good money, and that they're going to be lucky to ever see a dividend on their shares.
And a company that has wasted this long to get to the IPO stage is obviously lacking something in their corporate makeup - every other company managed it last year, why didn't they?
Frankly, the dream is over, and people like Eric Raymond are pretty much just as poor as they ever were. The best they can hope for is a low key event which puts then slightly above their asking price, rather than at some rediculously inflated value that will inevitably lead to the market getting scared off and dumping it like a cheap whore you've hit too hard.
I think, that this "step" was the right decission, because Turbo Linux is AFAIK the largest Linux Distributor in Asia.
Maybe some of you guys are saying: "So what?". Let me explain this. Asia will be one of the most important markets in Future, things didn't go well there in the last few Years, but IMHO it can't get worse in Asia. So Turbo Linux will grow, together with Aias economy. Maybe it will be as Important as SuSE in Germany.
Turbo Linux has quite a solid ground to start from even if it's quite a small company today.
Turbo Linux likes to distribute a CD with Linksys network cards. So when I was working the Resnet fair at my college, the bookstore sold Linksys, so we got a few Turbo Linux CD's that people didn't want.
However, this one girl comes down and says, "I can't get my card to work." She had tried setting it up herself. We thought it would be something like enabling DHCP or something simple. She brings her computer down and boots up. LILO appears on the screen. We laughed so hard. I think she got confused during the install when it started asking about partition tables.
Best of luck in their IPO!
This is my only real impression of turbo linux. It has nothing to do with their distro, software, or anything else. It has to do with their methods of sales.
:)
I work for a company that was fortunate enough to be at the Comdex in Toronto earlier this year, in the Linux Business Pavillion. We were showcasing our new product and were situated right beside TurboLinux. They had hired a guy who called himself a "Perceptionist". IMHO a glorified magician. Anyway, I'm not denying this guy was good. He had a great act and had a lot of cool things he did.
However, he didn't mention Turbo Linux a lot. Once and a while he would go into a speil where he'd throw out words that had close meaning, and that related to TL, and occasionally he'd mention them by name. His main purpose (and only purpose if you ask me) was to draw people to the booth. With promises of "sign up here and recieve $25 worth of software" (I never recieved anything BTW) and the like. There was also the issue of clogging the isleways. And I do mean clogging. We had people turning the chairs around in our booth so they could sit or stand on them to see him. That and you literally had to fight your way through this crowd to get through.
Anyway, like I said, he had a good show. He also had a LOUD show. His speaker system was set very high. The first day of the show TL, Caldara, and Penguin Linux had an unofficial "you turned your volume up so I'll turn mine up" battle. Our company, situated beside him and withouth the budget that TL had didn't have a chance.
For all three days we re-scheduled our twice daily demos where the president made a presentation from 12:00 to 12:30 to accomidate TL's speaker. We were quite polite I think. We also asked them on more than one occasion if it would be possible to turn the volume down, as even with our entire booth between us and them we still had to yell to talk to anyone who wanted to talk to us.
Our complaints, polite at first, were met with "oh I'm so sorry I'll correct that right away" and "our volume is in the control of comdex, we set it to whatever they want us to", followed by, well, no action.
At one point we had a HUGE amount of people around our booth, clogging the isles in fact, listening to a demo that was being given. At this point the perceptionist seemed to think "hey, there's people around but they're interested in that booth, I'll draw them away" and started up his act, effectivly moving a lot of the people away fro us to them. Sadly, there's not a lot of chance of "new firewall product" information beating out "I'll give you $4000USD if you can cut higher than me". After this we went and talked to the main person from TL *again* and was again met with "gee I'm really sorry about that".
Plain fscking rude is what it was if you ask me.
Now I don't begrudge them for trying to get people to their booth. The more people at their booth the more potential people at our booth, or in fact around the Linux Bus. Pav. in general, which is good. However, there is a clear differnece IMHO between good business practices and bad business practices. In this case, this particular programmer has turned from indifferent about TL to not liking them at all. So sorry TL, better luck next time.
Oh, and a postscript to that.... the same perceptionist didn't seem to hold up to his wonderful promises of "I'm here because I'm a stockholder and I love this company" as he was p1mping himself for Compaq at the SJ LWE this August
That's my TurboLinux story