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Mission Critical Linux in Trouble
Dynedain writes: "ZDNet reports that Mission Critical Linux who specialized in server clustering, is laying off 90% of their work force of 60 after failing to secure a buyer of the company. :("
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Mission Critical just went critical..
Rapid Nirvana
. Great, now that their site is /. into oblivion they have an awesome chance of attracting buyers, on top of that they wont have to worry about their bandwith bills either .
1
"Think, It aint illegal.....yet" - George Clinton
"Last Friday, the company announced new funding and a restructuring that eliminated its services and consulting work and significantly pared down its product line."
Yeah, I'd say that announcement just said it all. "Eliminated its services and consulting work..." and "pared down its product line". What else does a company need to do to dissolve itself?
Sadly, a failure like this is a high-visibility public relations disaster. Companies should refrain from including the name of an operating system in their company name.
Had the company "Mission Critical Implementations" gone under, it would have gone largely unnoticed.
Their failure as a business reflects poorly on their marketing and their business savvy - not on their choice of toolsets. The industry decision-makers, however, will be affected. "Yet another linux failure" will be the gut reaction.
>>Mission Critical Linux in Trouble
they're not in trouble. They're dead. Please give an example of any company that has had to resort to laying off *90%* of their staff and has survived the calendar year.
If they only employeed more folks, the media/politicos would scream about how this company's failure shows that capitalism doesn't work. Ignorance of economics is not an excuse.
Well, I keep harping on this, but companies need to figure out how they will provide value and either lower their costs below this, or find a way of boosting revenues with advertising. Being that many companies can't sell advertising to their custommers, means that cost control is the key...
I have seen many pre-IPO small company plans and most of them scare the heck out of me... If everything goes perfectly and we ship product the day that we plan, with custommer demand that we expect, we will be able to survive...
Well software engineering isn't that exact, and frankly custommer demand for a new product is horribly hard to predict...
Oh well another entry for fsck'dcompany.com
"Our mission is for forward thinking companies to be able to deploy Linux strategies and fulfill their business objectives. We consult with clients to develop the best technological solution to their business problems........"
So we read from their mission statement that basically they're a Linux services consulting company trying to compete in an arena where Redhat and IBM already have most of the dollars. I feel bad for them, but it's not something uncommon in a difficult market.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Does anyone else get nervous when a company that purports to offer mission critical systems has their own web site succumb to the /. effect?
No wonder they're laying of 90%...
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
Another report of a company associated with Linux going under. Do we have to rely on the IBMs of the world and the private hackers? Will the little companies be able to survive this economic cycle or was the Biz Model just poor for all these dying companies?
Would you like a knuckle sandwich?
Perhaps they should strategically rename themselves "Mission Impossible".
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Well, sell the ones that have not walked out the door with the ex-employees. ;) That is all they need to do to fully dissolve at this point.
Michael Loves Me!
Bloody hell! Now what's going to happen to the mission?!
-- the most controversial site on the Web
They should have clustered themselves - that way if one of their business nodes went bankrupt or was sued, then the other business nodes could take up the slack.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Once again, the patented DotCom Business Strategy (tm) fails.
1: Get cool-sounding name.
2: ??????
3: Profit!
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
... when i checked it out. The chance of seeing such a product go away with not even a bang makes me sad. Has anyone tried it in production?
/Pedro
Misstion Critical Linux announced that they had new financing and a renewed focus on high availability. Newsforge Mention of Press Release Here
well there web page seems to be down to, must be part of that 90% :)
I could care less about karma, so there's the disclaimer.
/. users make the following joke:
......
It's funny.. when an Open Source, Linux, BSD, *nux company is on its way down, everyone is sad and want to support or purchase products to try to keep it going. But any other company and many
Step one: product/service
Step two:
Step three: make money.
If any of these companies had a GOOD, well thought out business plan, they wouldn't be going out of business because they could find a buyer, Sep. 11th really hurt them, or the current economy keeps them from being profitable.
If they had a GOOD service/product that people need, then they will survive. It's the nature of business that some companies will rise and some companies will fall. That's LIFE.
(lets see how quickly my "against the flow thinking" gets me modded down)
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
How about Sale! Sale! Linux?
Unlike MCL, however, SteelEye does more than just Linux - they also handle Windows and Solaris products. Also, they have actually managed to get some agreements going with the likes of Compaq, IBM, and Intel.
Nice to have another commercial option besides RH for clustering...
If you want to do anything "mission critical"(definition: if your device breaks, people will die) then you DON'T use Linux, or Windows or any other popular operating system. You MIGHT use something like VxWorks but that's only if you are doing something complex. Otherwise you don't use any operating system, you just program a microcontroller.
If you take apart 90% of the mission critical systems in the world(ie heart monitors, air bag controller, etc) you'll find an 8051 or something similar inside. I don't want to trust my life to a million lines of spagetti code and neither do most people. Maybe this is why the company can't find a buyer??
fewer distros. At least in the for profit arena. Hobby distros don't depend on economics as much to stay around because they don't need to stay in business to stay around. I don't mean any disrespect to Mission Critical Linux. But there must be demand to meet the supply of distros.
It is sad that a Linux company has gone under, but maybe this is just a sign that in our (for now) weak economy there isn't room for a bunch of High-End Distributions quite yet. Red Hat is still going strong, but they have name recognition and have been around for a while. I have talked to people who didn't recognize the word "linux" but did recognize "Red Hat." In a time when companies are not spending very much on tech, companies are more likely to go with something they've heard of, regardless of how well it gets the job done. (again, not a slam on how good any distro may be, just a comment on human nature)
Hopefully as Linux continues to pick up speed / market share (which in my opinion it is doing and will continue to do) the need for more companies devoted to the "mission critical" niche will come to be. All it will take is time. More people have heard of Linux now, Linux continues to improve both in quality and ease of use. It is not going away, but sadly not every distro will make it.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
now i don't have to read fuckedcompany.com today.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Isnt this just another company that goes belly-up because they weren't making money in the first place? I believe that most companies (dot-coms) crashed because they thought that a nasdaq ticker would be some kind of miracle cure that would make money for them.
There are a few linux companes that does quite well and will continue to do so. Many hasn't gone public, and have no plans to do so, since they don't need money to expand or whatever.
First make money, then go public. You have a much better chance then.
But then, what the hell do I know?
.haeger
Soccer on the web: Hattrick
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You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Was the frownie taken from the ZDNet article, or was it part of the company's letter to employees and shareholders?
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Ouch. The words mission critical would be a hard enough job for an established company like IBM to live up to....Let alone a fly by night company thats not even going to be around to distribute the next security patch that just might make your "Mission Critical" server go up in a pile of smoke because of a division by zero error or something :)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
They have (had) a couple of nice products... Convolo in particular... and they were great FS / OS evangelizers... first DEC, then Compaq, now MCLX? What's going to move into Lowell now? HP?
Sorry things didn't work out MCL people. Consulting sucks, I know. My company had to lay people off to get to break even and we're still struggling to tread water. And we were one of the slow and steady firms during the boom. Its kept us afloat after the crash, but man does it suck. Competition is fierce and clients want more for less. Props for trying to do it with Linux (wish I was as lucky), but I guess it just didn't work out
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Which was supposed to be the centerpiece of their other lines of business... They couldn't get the consulting services business off the ground (Really bad timing more than anything else- nobody's doing ANYTHING in the industry. I just wish that these companies would wise up and realize that they make things far, far worse by trying to shore up their short-term profitability by laying people off- they're making the downturn that caused the lower profits worse than it needed to be.) so they killed the expensive part of the company and focused on the software that WAS making them money and reduced their staffing accordingly.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Everybody out there don't go crazy, stuff like this is bound to happen. All the time.
;) ) but most likely, if they had good linux programmers, I'm sure they'll get picked up by other linux companies. The not so good programmers they had, not so much. But remember, in other industries you get fired, and you were working on something you really loved, thats it, no more. At least here if the programmer gets fired, and he really has a passion for it, he can continue, at least in a way to contribute to his work/passion, until he gets picked up by another company.
It's the same in every area of industry. Yeah, Mission Critical was a Linux company, and thats to bad, but take a step back.
Only so many companies can survive in any area, currently, there are many, many linux companies out there. This process may hurt right now ( you know, on the inside
The ones who don't have the passion, the love, will most likely go on to other things.
Sorry if that last line sounded really corny.
I've made an observation after seeing this article.
Businesses dealing with Linux, whether it be hardware, distros, or whatever, should use better judgement in naming their business and products.
Case in point, "Mission Critical Linux" sounds good as long as the company is successful. However, the name is overly generic, and now that the company is headed for deeper waters, Mission Critical Linux could be mistaken for the concept of mission critical linux.
Now all it will take is a single incompetent journalist to briefly perview the headline, and make the assumption that "Linux" itself is in trouble. Want to take bets on how long it will be before this shows up in E-Week?
Another example would be a product called "Linux On The Desktop". The product gets the death axe, and then it could be misrepresented as "linux on the desktop is dying".
See the point? These companies running around trying to make a few bucks from open source products need to take a deeper look at properly branding their products. Enough said.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I pay for my linux CDs, and I don't download music without the performer's permission.
I don't consider it a waste of money, because my dollars keep the goods I want available.
Eventually, you will be doomed to listen to my favorite music, and load my preferred distribution, because you are too shortsighted to keep your favorites in the market. They'll all end up flipping burgers!
I confess that this amuses me.
--Charlie
Ok, here's the dirt. Basically we had to choose between getting more funding, or selling the company. Two offers came over the table to buy the company and we picked one. It fell through at the last moment and we had to make some tough decisions. Our support services were loosing money, so they're gone. We've kept profitable custom engineering projects and our cluster products groups. Hopefully we have enough funds to stay alive untill our products can support us. We're not planning on going completely out of business in the near future.
Full disclosure: I'm one of the employees that didn't loose their job. Someone else may be less optimistic about the whole thing. Since we were as nice as possible about laying people off (They got to stay around, paid, using their offices to find new jobs for three weeks) you probably won't find too many pissed off ex-employees.
It's too bad that this story hit now, when we're moving our office, rather than three weeks ago when we all learned what was happening. It's amazing that 50 people managed to keep their mouths shut for so long :)
"Mission Critical Linux would have had to lay off staff, with no severance
... buy what's valuable for a song, dump the rest, screw the investors and employees, file Chapter 7...and Angell walks away with a bag full of money and IP while everyone else gets screwed. And I thought Linux was supposed to be different...
and probably still would seek relief in bankruptcy court, Angell said......
With buyout hopes on the wane, Angell formed a new corporation--which soon
will be named Mission Critical Linux LLC--and bought the old company's
assets with funding from undisclosed investors. "
Oh, yeah
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu
It would seem to me that most companies large enough to actually NEED a 'mission critical' server farm would have their own IT staff. So why would they outsource the work of setting it up when their own people can do it cheaper? Seems like MCL really limited themselves from the start.
To those Open Source consultants among you, think small business.
Now will be a TRUE test of OpenSource. Mission Critical projects such as Kimberlite (server failover/clustering) will be seeking new homes. The OpenSource Initiative was created to support disasters such as this. Let's show the corporate world that OpenSource IS viable. When the time comes, by adopting these orphan projects, we can show corporations across the world the power of OpenSource - transcendence of the project beyond the life of the origional developers.
oh please! Everybody and his great Aunt Haddy starts a linux company. Just because one bites the dust in no way means linux is going away. If anything the ones with the bad business models are fading away as they should. BSD is a devel platform - if anything it is destined for obscurity. RH, SuSE, etc will prosper. They continue to reap large contracts and OEM support.
As long as M$ keeps pulling their license antics more enterprise and businesses will continue to use linux. The numbers bear this out. Just another linux company that didn't make and ends up being FUD fodder. Not much to worry about.
Yeah no shit!
I did a Linux -> FreeBSD conversion, saved the company a couple hundred grand. How you ask? The servers performed 10x as fast with FreeBSD... no SW mods, no nothing. FreeBSD is just faster, and the boxes also had at least 2x the uptime. The SW always crashed the linux boxes.
"I did a Linux -> FreeBSD conversion, saved the company a couple hundred grand."
And then they blew it all on a fancy website.
http://www.minions.com/
Which of their mission critical failover clusters were you using? I'm sure they're very sorry you didn't like it.
"This is another example of how the Linux community doesn't support companies that bank on Linux with any significant financial response."
They don't need the support of the Linux community, they need the support of the business community. They aren't just selling another distro, they are selling mission critical solutions to people who can't afford downtime.
Do you expect everyone in the Linux community to buy a failover cluster and keep it in the garden shed to help them out?