I agree with you that Novell probably ought to have forseen that Steve Balmer would do some sort of spin to Microsoft's advantage. I'm sure they put hope before paranoia, which is a mistake when the opponent is Microsoft.
The link to the CNN Money insiders page doesn't show the data that it probably once did.
That kind of stuff doesn't bother me anyway. Novell is a corporation beholden to it's stockholders, and it has a couple stock holders who bought tons of stock, and are now disappointed that their money has not doubled. These are the guys that got rid of Jack Messman, Eric Schmidt before that, John Young before that, Lew Platt before that (you get the idea). So that fact that they have all new upper management doesn't suprise me. Novell has also had the problem that the stupid finance guys demand layoffs to make the stock look good on paper. These big-money guys want to liquidate the company; Hovspeian wants to save the company. From what I have heard, Hovsepian has actually reversed the layoffs, and got permission to let product managers hire staff.
That's something you do when you have a long-term outlook for your company.
So if Novell took a wad of cash that had just been handed to them, and paid off the big money guys to get rid of them - that was probably a good move.
I can see where you might be skeptical of Novell's actions because they do have financial obligations.
That's a very good point. It is just a matter of time. There will still be money for companies that provide support - but it would be nothing but a waste of time for a company like Microsoft to try to fight Free Software with patent infringement claims.
Thank you. The explanation wrt to shake-downs / protection money makes sense. I hadn't really thought about it that way, because we've been a Novell shop since 1992. We've been paying Novell for use licenses and technical support for all our products, and from this point of view, Linux was just another OS, the successor to NetWare. We've been thinking of our license and support fees as just that: money to them, to support us.
With the Novell-MS deal, the balance of cash moved toward Novell and away from Microsoft, so it didn't seem like MS was getting anything. If Novell canceled the deal tomorrow, would MS even notice the change on their balance sheet? But you make the good point that Microsoft gets to market their so-called-infringed-IP as having value, because of the Novell payment.
Unfortunately, I don't see how to get away from software patents, short of picking a fight with Microsoft, where Microsoft loses. And that will only work if MS is dumb enough to step up to the fight. Intimidation via FUD is effective, and they'd be silly to give it up.
Do you think it will be possible to get Microsoft to "show us the code" or shut up? Or is there another way to render the idea of software patents weightless (in the legal sense)?
That's kind of my point. Novell knows that the agreement expires in five years. They must think that in five years there won't be any Microsoft code in Linux (if there is any in there today - which they explicitly deny knowledge of). Any other option is suicide - and I don't see Novell as suicidal.
Did Novell have plans to get Microsoft to smother Red Hat? That is too far a stretch for me to believe. One small player doesn't try to eliminate all the other small players so that they are the only one left to slay the giant. Because you have to admit: it's a freaking huge giant. First you and your allies slay the giant; then you all fight over the loot.
Novell did the deal with Microsoft to get access to customers that were otherwise in the Microsoft camp. Does that make them on the side of Microsoft? I don't think so, because of how badly MS has treated Novell. But I can see how it looks bad.
Now, if you are suggesting that Microsoft went into the deal with the idea "We'll threaten Red Hat, and make it look like it was Novell's idea" - sure - that is a master-stroke for the Microsoft marketing machine.
Indeed: look at how people have turned against Novell. If Steve Balmer reads Slashdot, he's loving this!
"Harming the community" in this case means "Novell got Microsoft to agree to not sue Novell customers" ?
And if Novell renegotiates that portion of the deal, then the FSF would be happy?
I see where that has some appeal; it puts Novell in the same position as Red Hat. But to me it also means the death of Linux in large data centers. Not that Sun would mind that....
If you are large enough to have a big data center, you are large enough to attract nuisance lawsuits. No CIO is going to expose his company to those kinds of lawsuits just for an OS. (Which brings my CIO back to Windows). And that is exactly why Novell lost four big data center deals: Novell made their pitch, and Microsoft followed up with "So Novell is telling you to commit to a new OS that has Intellectual Property problems, hmmm?" It is classic FUD - but it works. In the large corporation with enough cash to be a litigation target - a CIO would have to be reckless to the point of "fiduciary malfeasance" to purposefully adopt something with such well publicized baggage.
We only got permission to install Linux because we promised the CIO that he wouldn't get egg on his face. Novell had already promised us indemnity in case SCO (or whomever) sued.
I cannot imagine that Novell or Red Hat wants to approach new customers with the line "in case you get sued by Microsoft, we'll be here for you".
I assume that it was the "we won't sue each other's customers" clause that made this stink. That's the driver toward Novell and away from Red Hat, right? If my assumption is wrong, then I still don't understand.
I'm sure you are correct that Microsoft is trying to stop people from migrating away from their products. You are also correct that their FUD machine spun up the community to a fearsome level.
Sigh.
Almost like they knew that the idealists would work against the pragmatists.
Thank you for that. It is understandable to me now, and I can see why you think that. I'm not in total agreement - but at least it makes sense to me now.:-)
My primary concern is that if my CIO has to choose between Free Software and Microsoft - he will choose Microsoft. If the FSF is dead-set against Novell being able to redistribute GPL v3 code, then I'm going to have to learn to love The Dark Side.
Worse, Novell now benefits from Microsoft's patents getting more and more dangerous.
I'm a Novell customer, and Novell makes a decent amount of money off us. If Novell gave Microsoft a reason to sue us, we'd drop Novell and become an all-Microsoft shop.
I don't understand why people think Novell wants to jeopardizes it's business.
There was speculation that the deal was designed to scare Red Hat customers over to Novell. But I don't see that as reasonable either. If Microsoft sues Red Hat customers, Red Hat, the FSF, and indeed Novell will sue Microsoft to show us the code.
I just don't get it. We had one Linux server going into 2006, and because of our Novell license agreement, at the end of 2006 we had twenty-two. (We're up to 25 now). Seven or so of those were migrations away from NetWare - which is the sensible path Novell is suggesting to it's customers. Why does Novell want to jeopardize that?
What does make sense to me is that Novell kept trying to sell Linux into big companies, and the Microsoft FUD was working. The only real way for Novell to counter that was the Novell-MS deal.
My CIO thinks better of Linux, now that Microsoft has acknowledged it. If Microsoft was trying to sow FUD in our shop, that certainly back-fired.
Although, if the FSF is successful in cutting Novell's Achilles Heel, then I suppose the Microsoft gamble will have been worth it (to Microsoft at least).
The reason it is a pain is that months ago, people started populating their calendars with meetings in Exchange/Notes/GroupWise for the time period that has been screwed with by the Department of Enegy. Those meetings are typically stored as UTC with an offset.
So you are mostly correct - if we patched up, then we wouldn't be stressing out now - but we would have had to patch up many months ago. IIRC the change didn't become official until last August (which is an excuse, and sounds like it - but there it is).
Many people didn't patch until a month ago, and we now have a mix of meetings on the calendar. Some are correct, some need to be adjusted by an hour.
Thankfully for me, GroupWise stores the DST offset* with the meeting**, and Novell released a beta tool to use that DST info to auto-adjust the meetings for us.
* The DST offset had to be extended to "UTC -8 where -8 applies on First Sunday in April" or "UTC -8 where -8 applies on Second Sunday in March".
**Mostly - depends on the client used to create the meeting. For example, if the meeting was scheduled on a BlackBerry or Treo, those don't put the DST info in with the meeting. Same is true of old GroupWise clients (and yes some places have not upgraded).
(Nowhere does it say that the solaris servers are running telnet. But our IT organization has a connection to a state agency, and today the state agency warned us they had a virus on the rampage. That agency has one of those solaris servers running in one of our mini data centers.)
That is like calling a police officer a fanatic for wanting to carry a pistol instead of a shotgun. He has his reasons, and although they aren't apparent to you, your labeling him a fanatic for his choice is bigoted.
Taking the police weapon analogy a step further, his question is the same as a police officer asking which make and model of pistol to buy. Would you label him a fanatic for being shotgun-exclusionary?
Just because you prefer shotguns doesn't mean that people who prefer pistols are fanatics.
And he did qualify why he doesn't like the migration path proposed by his vendor: ActiveX controls. If you don't see what is wrong with that, well, that is your business. But don't go calling someone else that does see the problem a fanatic for recognizing the problem and wanting to choose a different path.
Minor disagreement: I think that robots.txt does qualify as an accepted custom, at least when you are dealing with professionals. And if we are talking about newspaper web sites in the publishing business, I think it would be hard to argue that they are not professionals. If they accept any money at all for their online subscriptions, or have any revenue from banner ads, they are in this for real. Probably even hired a professional webmaster.
That was a dumb comment. For all you know, they've been burned by HIPPA violations because IE let some malware in. My point being, he knows what he wants, and you don't know jack about why that is. For you to call him a fanatic is bigoted.
Bummer is that I was at a conference this last weekend, and someone there clobbered us this way. I saw the Free Wi-Fi network, but didn't bother connecting as I knew the conference network had a different ID. Still, the infected machine completely clobbered the wireless access point. My four hours for training to ssh into the server and install/configure/test turned into less than ten minutes of connectivity and a whole bunch of presentation slide watching.
I really liked BattleZone and BattleZone2. Although it was essentially a FPS, it had strategy components akin to C&C. And the multiplayer deathmatches were gobs of fun.
At least with older MediaWiki (ver. 1.4), it didn't search on IP addresses. That is to say, each octet of an IP address was too small for MySQL to index, so you couldn't search by IP address. If you knew you were looking for the Central Plant router, you were fine - but if you had 192.168.2.123 and wanted to find where that was used, you were s.o.l.
Another deficiency is that MediaWiki doesn't support image map. Sometimes the best way to find info is to click on the picture....
A week later we were all sitting in Chicago having a discussion about virtualization.
To do with what exactly?
You seem to ignore the fact that Microsoft isn't above dirty tricks to break their competitor's products. By getting Microsoft to agree, in writing, to collaborate on interoperability, Novell is protecting themselves.
Just because it is in a VM, doesn't mean it is invulnerable. It makes sense to me that Novell would like to have legal assurance that sabotage isn't just an accident, but "breach of contract" as well.
From Hovsepian's point of view: "Dang - lost four huge sales. The Microsoft IP FUD is working. What can I do to break it?"
And your choices are 1) sit idly by. 2) broker a deal with the 800 lb. gorilla to pay you $108 million, and go on the record: the MS IP FUD doesn't apply if you buy SuSE.
From Microsoft's point of view: Which is better for Microsoft? Microsoft versus Sun, Novell, Oracle, RedHat, and the Linux community? or Novell versus Sun, Oracle, RedHat, and the Linux community?
That's cool. If we got into a monetary crunch, we would probably implement what you mention here. One of the nice things about GWAVA is that it we have it configured to send an HTML message to users daily, where they can pull a message out of the bit-bucket (so-to-speak). That is to say, they get a digest message of what was blocked, and if something was improperly blocked, they can have it sent to them anyway. Version 4 (due out any minute now) will take this to the next level, where users can manager their own white lists on the GWAVA server.
But it is nice to know that there are alternatives available that are also free.:-)
Another possibility is focus-deflection. Which is better for Microsoft? Microsoft versus IBM, Novell, Oracle, and RedHat, or Novell versus IBM, Oracle, and RedHat?
If you watched the TV show Big Brother this summer, you know the value of a puppet-master keeping the little guys squabbling.
The postfix server uses RBLs to drop about 25,000 messages per day. If postfix accepts it, it gets handed off to a different server that does SURBL checks. (That is done by a commercial product called GWAVA). The SURBLs catch about another 2,000 messages per day.
I have published my SPF data - so at least other people have the option of identifying whether stuff that claims to have come from my domain is legitimate or not. But our mailers are not yet doing SPF lookups. When we have a little time, we will probably add it to the postfix server. If the site specifies in their SPF record to 'hard' drop email that comes from anywhere but x (and the connecting server is at y), we'll treat it like an RBL.
The down side to having GWAVA one hop in from the postfix server is that some spammers get paid if the receiving mail server accepts the whole message - a (250 OK) by postfix means the spammer gets paid even if GWAVA later throws away the message. The GWAVA for Linux product is in beta test; once it goes official, I might be able to move it onto the postfix server, and hang up on the bad messages earlier.
The problem is forgery. The complaint that 'extending SMTP to prevent forgery adds cruft' ignores a real problem.
Gimme your home email address - I'll send 10,000 messages or so with you as the (forged) sender (return-address). Are you sure you want me to be considered an equal when it comes to sending mail from your email address?
So the solution is to extend SMTP with out-of-band identity of some sort. SPF is a protocol that says that I am not a valid sender for mail from your domain. This is a good thing. I'm only going to reject mail from "non-you" if you publish an SPF record that defines which mail servers you want identified as valid senders for you. If you don't publish an SPF record, I'm not going to make any decisions based on which mail server is connecting as you.
I did read some of the stuff you linked to re IM2000. What I read suggests to replace a push system with a push then pull system. I don't see that it would stop spam, nor would it stop forgery used to facilitate spam. At some point, to prevent forgery you need to look up a published identity. For SMTP, that would be SPF or SenderID. For IM2000, that would be... the equivalent of SPF or SenderID....
Did we really need a whole new email system for just that?
Worse, IM2000 breaks my single-instance-storage system unless the plan is to get ridiculously complex.
Sorry - I like SPF as a lightweight simple (opt-in) extension of SMTP. If you want to send email from any machine anywhere, don't publish an SPF record - I'll still accept email from you. Well, I'll trust it is you, although you might turn out to be Alan Ralsky.;-)
So there is this high-tech, (old) company I really like. Unfortunately, while their stock price was low, a few large investors bought in, big.
The cash infusion did not a miraculous turn-around make.
The lack of progress caused calls for cost-cutting. It is easy for the finance people to quantify how much money they would save by cutting salary expense. There is no similar offset for computing the increase in ill will....
Every year, the company announces another layoff. Every year, the competition (Microsoft) announces the imminent death of the company. Every year, customers learn that some of the people they had been working with are now gone. Every year, the people still there watch the company cannibalize itself a little more to make the investors happy.
Back at the board room, it has gotten to the point where the large cash investors essentially want the company to liquidate itself. If they get the company to sell itself off in pieces, they can recoup some of the cash they invested.
My question One: how can a company tell which large cash investors are terribly bad news? Is there some way to identify the pillagers from the long-term growth investors?
My question Two: is there any way to save the company? Really good progress is being made; but, it isn't happening overnight.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh wait a minute - that would be Canonical.
Perhaps your bias is getting in the way of your fairness?
The link to the CNN Money insiders page doesn't show the data that it probably once did.
That kind of stuff doesn't bother me anyway. Novell is a corporation beholden to it's stockholders, and it has a couple stock holders who bought tons of stock, and are now disappointed that their money has not doubled. These are the guys that got rid of Jack Messman, Eric Schmidt before that, John Young before that, Lew Platt before that (you get the idea). So that fact that they have all new upper management doesn't suprise me. Novell has also had the problem that the stupid finance guys demand layoffs to make the stock look good on paper. These big-money guys want to liquidate the company; Hovspeian wants to save the company. From what I have heard, Hovsepian has actually reversed the layoffs, and got permission to let product managers hire staff.
That's something you do when you have a long-term outlook for your company.
So if Novell took a wad of cash that had just been handed to them, and paid off the big money guys to get rid of them - that was probably a good move.
I can see where you might be skeptical of Novell's actions because they do have financial obligations.
Thank you.
With the Novell-MS deal, the balance of cash moved toward Novell and away from Microsoft, so it didn't seem like MS was getting anything. If Novell canceled the deal tomorrow, would MS even notice the change on their balance sheet? But you make the good point that Microsoft gets to market their so-called-infringed-IP as having value, because of the Novell payment.
Unfortunately, I don't see how to get away from software patents, short of picking a fight with Microsoft, where Microsoft loses. And that will only work if MS is dumb enough to step up to the fight. Intimidation via FUD is effective, and they'd be silly to give it up.
Do you think it will be possible to get Microsoft to "show us the code" or shut up? Or is there another way to render the idea of software patents weightless (in the legal sense)?
Did Novell have plans to get Microsoft to smother Red Hat? That is too far a stretch for me to believe. One small player doesn't try to eliminate all the other small players so that they are the only one left to slay the giant. Because you have to admit: it's a freaking huge giant. First you and your allies slay the giant; then you all fight over the loot.
Novell did the deal with Microsoft to get access to customers that were otherwise in the Microsoft camp. Does that make them on the side of Microsoft? I don't think so, because of how badly MS has treated Novell. But I can see how it looks bad.
Now, if you are suggesting that Microsoft went into the deal with the idea "We'll threaten Red Hat, and make it look like it was Novell's idea" - sure - that is a master-stroke for the Microsoft marketing machine.
Indeed: look at how people have turned against Novell. If Steve Balmer reads Slashdot, he's loving this!
And if Novell renegotiates that portion of the deal, then the FSF would be happy?
I see where that has some appeal; it puts Novell in the same position as Red Hat. But to me it also means the death of Linux in large data centers. Not that Sun would mind that....
If you are large enough to have a big data center, you are large enough to attract nuisance lawsuits. No CIO is going to expose his company to those kinds of lawsuits just for an OS. (Which brings my CIO back to Windows). And that is exactly why Novell lost four big data center deals: Novell made their pitch, and Microsoft followed up with "So Novell is telling you to commit to a new OS that has Intellectual Property problems, hmmm?" It is classic FUD - but it works. In the large corporation with enough cash to be a litigation target - a CIO would have to be reckless to the point of "fiduciary malfeasance" to purposefully adopt something with such well publicized baggage.
We only got permission to install Linux because we promised the CIO that he wouldn't get egg on his face. Novell had already promised us indemnity in case SCO (or whomever) sued.
I cannot imagine that Novell or Red Hat wants to approach new customers with the line "in case you get sued by Microsoft, we'll be here for you".
I assume that it was the "we won't sue each other's customers" clause that made this stink. That's the driver toward Novell and away from Red Hat, right? If my assumption is wrong, then I still don't understand.
Sigh.
Almost like they knew that the idealists would work against the pragmatists.
My primary concern is that if my CIO has to choose between Free Software and Microsoft - he will choose Microsoft. If the FSF is dead-set against Novell being able to redistribute GPL v3 code, then I'm going to have to learn to love The Dark Side.
Yuck.
I'm a Novell customer, and Novell makes a decent amount of money off us. If Novell gave Microsoft a reason to sue us, we'd drop Novell and become an all-Microsoft shop.
I don't understand why people think Novell wants to jeopardizes it's business.
There was speculation that the deal was designed to scare Red Hat customers over to Novell. But I don't see that as reasonable either. If Microsoft sues Red Hat customers, Red Hat, the FSF, and indeed Novell will sue Microsoft to show us the code.
I just don't get it. We had one Linux server going into 2006, and because of our Novell license agreement, at the end of 2006 we had twenty-two. (We're up to 25 now). Seven or so of those were migrations away from NetWare - which is the sensible path Novell is suggesting to it's customers. Why does Novell want to jeopardize that?
What does make sense to me is that Novell kept trying to sell Linux into big companies, and the Microsoft FUD was working. The only real way for Novell to counter that was the Novell-MS deal.
My CIO thinks better of Linux, now that Microsoft has acknowledged it. If Microsoft was trying to sow FUD in our shop, that certainly back-fired.
Although, if the FSF is successful in cutting Novell's Achilles Heel, then I suppose the Microsoft gamble will have been worth it (to Microsoft at least).
So you are mostly correct - if we patched up, then we wouldn't be stressing out now - but we would have had to patch up many months ago. IIRC the change didn't become official until last August (which is an excuse, and sounds like it - but there it is).
Many people didn't patch until a month ago, and we now have a mix of meetings on the calendar. Some are correct, some need to be adjusted by an hour.
Thankfully for me, GroupWise stores the DST offset* with the meeting**, and Novell released a beta tool to use that DST info to auto-adjust the meetings for us.
* The DST offset had to be extended to "UTC -8 where -8 applies on First Sunday in April" or "UTC -8 where -8 applies on Second Sunday in March".
**Mostly - depends on the client used to create the meeting. For example, if the meeting was scheduled on a BlackBerry or Treo, those don't put the DST info in with the meeting. Same is true of old GroupWise clients (and yes some places have not upgraded).
(Nowhere does it say that the solaris servers are running telnet. But our IT organization has a connection to a state agency, and today the state agency warned us they had a virus on the rampage. That agency has one of those solaris servers running in one of our mini data centers.)
Taking the police weapon analogy a step further, his question is the same as a police officer asking which make and model of pistol to buy. Would you label him a fanatic for being shotgun-exclusionary?
Just because you prefer shotguns doesn't mean that people who prefer pistols are fanatics.
And he did qualify why he doesn't like the migration path proposed by his vendor: ActiveX controls. If you don't see what is wrong with that, well, that is your business. But don't go calling someone else that does see the problem a fanatic for recognizing the problem and wanting to choose a different path.
Minor disagreement: I think that robots.txt does qualify as an accepted custom, at least when you are dealing with professionals. And if we are talking about newspaper web sites in the publishing business, I think it would be hard to argue that they are not professionals. If they accept any money at all for their online subscriptions, or have any revenue from banner ads, they are in this for real. Probably even hired a professional webmaster.
That was a dumb comment. For all you know, they've been burned by HIPPA violations because IE let some malware in. My point being, he knows what he wants, and you don't know jack about why that is. For you to call him a fanatic is bigoted.
Bummer is that I was at a conference this last weekend, and someone there clobbered us this way. I saw the Free Wi-Fi network, but didn't bother connecting as I knew the conference network had a different ID. Still, the infected machine completely clobbered the wireless access point. My four hours for training to ssh into the server and install/configure/test turned into less than ten minutes of connectivity and a whole bunch of presentation slide watching.
Another deficiency is that MediaWiki doesn't support image map. Sometimes the best way to find info is to click on the picture....
Just because it is in a VM, doesn't mean it is invulnerable. It makes sense to me that Novell would like to have legal assurance that sabotage isn't just an accident, but "breach of contract" as well.
From Hovsepian's point of view: "Dang - lost four huge sales. The Microsoft IP FUD is working. What can I do to break it?"
And your choices are 1) sit idly by. 2) broker a deal with the 800 lb. gorilla to pay you $108 million, and go on the record: the MS IP FUD doesn't apply if you buy SuSE.
From Microsoft's point of view: Which is better for Microsoft? Microsoft versus Sun, Novell, Oracle, RedHat, and the Linux community? or Novell versus Sun, Oracle, RedHat, and the Linux community?
Agreed - why move the data to the users, to when you can bring the users to the data?
But it is nice to know that there are alternatives available that are also free. :-)
If you watched the TV show Big Brother this summer, you know the value of a puppet-master keeping the little guys squabbling.
I have published my SPF data - so at least other people have the option of identifying whether stuff that claims to have come from my domain is legitimate or not. But our mailers are not yet doing SPF lookups. When we have a little time, we will probably add it to the postfix server. If the site specifies in their SPF record to 'hard' drop email that comes from anywhere but x (and the connecting server is at y), we'll treat it like an RBL.
The down side to having GWAVA one hop in from the postfix server is that some spammers get paid if the receiving mail server accepts the whole message - a (250 OK) by postfix means the spammer gets paid even if GWAVA later throws away the message. The GWAVA for Linux product is in beta test; once it goes official, I might be able to move it onto the postfix server, and hang up on the bad messages earlier.
Gimme your home email address - I'll send 10,000 messages or so with you as the (forged) sender (return-address). Are you sure you want me to be considered an equal when it comes to sending mail from your email address?
So the solution is to extend SMTP with out-of-band identity of some sort. SPF is a protocol that says that I am not a valid sender for mail from your domain. This is a good thing. I'm only going to reject mail from "non-you" if you publish an SPF record that defines which mail servers you want identified as valid senders for you. If you don't publish an SPF record, I'm not going to make any decisions based on which mail server is connecting as you.
I did read some of the stuff you linked to re IM2000. What I read suggests to replace a push system with a push then pull system. I don't see that it would stop spam, nor would it stop forgery used to facilitate spam. At some point, to prevent forgery you need to look up a published identity. For SMTP, that would be SPF or SenderID. For IM2000, that would be... the equivalent of SPF or SenderID....
Did we really need a whole new email system for just that?
Worse, IM2000 breaks my single-instance-storage system unless the plan is to get ridiculously complex.
Sorry - I like SPF as a lightweight simple (opt-in) extension of SMTP. If you want to send email from any machine anywhere, don't publish an SPF record - I'll still accept email from you. Well, I'll trust it is you, although you might turn out to be Alan Ralsky. ;-)
The cash infusion did not a miraculous turn-around make.
The lack of progress caused calls for cost-cutting. It is easy for the finance people to quantify how much money they would save by cutting salary expense. There is no similar offset for computing the increase in ill will....
Every year, the company announces another layoff. Every year, the competition (Microsoft) announces the imminent death of the company. Every year, customers learn that some of the people they had been working with are now gone. Every year, the people still there watch the company cannibalize itself a little more to make the investors happy.
Back at the board room, it has gotten to the point where the large cash investors essentially want the company to liquidate itself. If they get the company to sell itself off in pieces, they can recoup some of the cash they invested.
My question One: how can a company tell which large cash investors are terribly bad news? Is there some way to identify the pillagers from the long-term growth investors?
My question Two: is there any way to save the company? Really good progress is being made; but, it isn't happening overnight.
Thank you for your time with these questions.