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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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. 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
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.
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/
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.
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.
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
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.
Ok, I was one of the employees that got the axe, and I'm telling you it ain't like that. The company was very up-front about all their dealings and did everything in their power to keep the employees from getting screwed. They paid us for a month and maintained our benefits while we basically used their facilities to find new work.
As for Rick Angell, he's taking a gamble. He's paid what I consider more than what the IP is worth for both the IP and the company's debt (which must still be discharged somehow), gambling that MCL's IP will actually become worth something, and he's kept around as many employees as made sense to work on those projects. In the end, it could all still fall flat...
FWIW I've dealt with Rick personally, and he believes in Linux. He also believes in (at least some of) the products MCL was/is developing, and is pumping his own money into the company to keep it alive. That's quite a gamble to take, if your goal is to rape the failed company... And even the rest of the investors weren't interested in screwing over the employees... If they were, they could have declared bankruptcy a month early and split the cash that was paid to employees in salaries and benefits.
Sure, it's easy to be cynical when something like this happens. But management and the investors really did try to do everything they could to keep the company alive... and then for the employees, when it became evident that wasn't an option.