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Novell Layoffs Coming This Month?
Roblimo writes "Multiple sources close to and inside Novell have told us the company expects to lay off between 10% and 15% of all employees by the end of October. '...shareholders have suggested that Novell divest itself of its consulting group and GroupWise division, while at the same time instituting personnel cuts across the board to bring expenses more in line with revenues,' writes business columnist Lauren Rudd at NewsForge, who also notes that '[Novell's] NetWare revenue stream continues to deteriorate, declining by $36 million in fiscal 2004, excluding the impact of favorable foreign exchange rates.'" NewsForge is part of the same family of companies as Slashdot.
Let's hope all the FOSS projects they support won't be effected; Hula / Beagle / Evolution / GNOME / LDTP / MONO / Mozilla / OpenOffice and UDDI are worked on by many employees. Last I heard they employed about 50 people just to work on Hula, and their overall view to FOSS has been excellent. Having worked with some of them on the project, I am amazed at the support they've recieved from Novell; let's hope it continues.
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I worked at a University campus for a while where we used NetWare extensively. When I started there, Novell folks thought the world of NetWare. By the time I left, there were some serious concerns among the NetWare crowd. NWAdmin was being phased out by ConsoleOne (which is fine) but then the Wed-based manager (forget the name) came in and they claimed they were phasing out ConsoleOne. ConsoleOne was only a year or so old! At that time, we had to run three different admin frontends because each had their own quirks and were incompatible with some stuff. Their NetMail system was a bit of a disappointment performance-wise (but not feature-wise). It took them a LONG time to work out some serious kinks in IFolder (like changing the default directory of the local folder). There's also the problem that NetWare != Novell. A lot of the more popular pieces of Novell's lineup (GroupWise, ZenWorks, NetMail) can be run from a Windows server over Active Directory now.
Novell has all the components of a solid business, just not the vision. Just look at their homepage - does it tell you who they are or what they have planned for the future?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
"...shareholders have suggested that Novell divest itself of its consulting group and GroupWise division..."
In other news, shareholders have also suggested that Microsoft needs to dump Office, and Apple should just stop with the iPod thing already.
You know, eDirectory is nice and all, but I promise you there are more than a few Netware shops out there who continue to be Netware shops primarly because of Groupwise.
When I spoke with a salesmen about becoming a potential reseller/OEM of Suse, the salesman I was speaking with said "If you're only going to sell 2 or 3 licenses a month it's not worth my time. We want large deployments." He said that about 5 times in a 15 minute conversation.
I might not be a $1mil/mth salesman, but I can tell you from a purchaser's perspective it doesn't matter how much or how little you sell, being told @#$% like that really just flat out ticks a person off. The specific job I was bidding on would have been 50 desktop licenses and 2 servers, but because of that kind of comments that were repeatedly said to me...well, Redhat won the contract instead of Suse.
I've never really been impressed with Suse in the first place, but the customer had heard good things about it and wanted to go that direction to replace MS desktops and Novell servers in their business. After explaining the situation I had run into with the Suse sale tactics, they decided to follow my previous suggestion. So not only did they lose a customer that had specifically requested it, they lost a company that would have been selling their products and promoting it.
So yeah, doing B.S. like that is going to hurt the bottom line and one can only hope that the salesman I spoke with is one that ends up on the unemployment line. Granted, it would take ALOT more than that to make me consider Suse again simply because that guy should NEVER have been allowed to be talking to the public about buying products.
It has great products, but a lousy, overbureaucratized management structure with lots and lots of layers of people whose sole functions are to shaft the people below them and survive the next purge by the people above. This makes for a fanatically strong political system, with lots and lots of people looking over their shoulders instead of looking forward.
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It is also centrally managed, Soviet-style, complete with multi-year plans and targets and Novell employees are regularly gathered together to compliment their leader for the overperformance on this meaningless metric, and the achievement of "difficult" targets in the teeth of a bitter competitive wind. As is usual in command enterprises, everywhere else other than Provo is treated as a satellite state. Only from Provo do all the ideas come, so if you're bright and have a great idea and don't work in Provo, don't bother telling anyone about it because they don't want to know. And if you persist they'll park you in a shitty job until you get the message and leave. Lots did.
There should be a sign on all offices "Abandon initiative all ye who enter here". They have lots of meetings whose purpose is to crush all ideas from below and praise the crappy ones from above. Rebranding, corporate restructuring, departmental changes, layering, delayering, change management etc are regular 3-6 month occurences. During my five years there, I moved desks 16 times. Eventually you don't bother emptying boxes into your drawers because you know that another org change is just around the corner. The people adminsitering these changes never moved. It was uncanny.
Initiatives come thick and fast from above and your only choices are to keep your mouth shut or be drowned in the slurry. At one time, everyone in Novell went through the Kepner-Trego rational decision making course, complete with little cards and posters on the wall and papers for people to do rational decisions on. The only problem with that, is in order for rational decision making, there must be rational decision makers, which in Novell is a joke. One month after the course nobody mentioned, let alone used, Kepner-Trego again.
Then Novell merged with Cambridge Consulting (or was it Cambridge Consulting reversed into Novell?) Cambridge weren't doing very well. Novell weren't doing very well - the result would be a world-beater? Like to guess?
Cambridge added a lot more consultants that Novell didn't need. In order to employ those extra consultants, Novell did the most obvious thing: it screwed its partners. So the partners who had done such sterling work promoting the Novell brand found that Novell itself was competing for those same customers to order to employ those extra consultants that Novell didn't need.
With all of this could Novell make a profit through its Consulting arm? No. It charged twice as much and still managed to lose money because most of the time, it pitched for delivery times that were too short and had to use up all of the profit and then some to pay its consultants past the end date in order to deliver at all. Thus Novell managed to screw its partners and fail to make a profit. The perfect result for its competitors. One customer I consulted for that after their experience, they would never use Novell Consulting again (this was one of the largest privately-held companies on the planet).
Novell joined the Linux field too late and bought the wrong company (should have been Red Hat). It bought SilverStream for too much money. It's been behind the curve for lots of new products too often.
It's testing and quality of software are terrible. More often than not, products would be shipped with key pieces of functionality missing pending the first or second service pack. The software would work, but you had to wait to be able to deploy it meaningfully.
Novell should be bought by somebody who knows how to run an enterprise for profit. Instead its run by people who know only how to cover their own asses and rule by fear. I guarantee you, any turnaround specialist would perform a decapitation of Novell's byzantine management structure to stand any chance.
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Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
> You honestly believe that you should be given a job, money and personal wealth.
No. I think Capitalism is a failed experiment that doesn't treat all people the same way. The american dream is dead.
Socialism makes far more sense, and most of the Western world agrees with me. Big shock. And at very nearly the same level of taxation as most socialist countries I just have to wonder what the government is doing with our money that we have so few services to show for it all.
You and I both know they use our tax money to support their illegal war instead of helping out the poor and homeless in this country.
Why are we trying to "gift" democracy to people half a world away instead of providing basic dignity and a solid education to the poor of our own country? I suppose they should just have to work for it all themselves, eh genius? I guess no one ever gave you a hand up or a real opportunity out of poverty?
Classic american rightwing bullshit to not recognize how we are a nation built from the middle class out. You now earn your keep based on the struggles of former union workers and an epic battle for civil rights for all people regardless of race or gender. I guess those roads you drive on are just commie propaganda, right?