From: Mike Anderer Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003 To: csontag@sco.com CC: Bob Bench Subject: Conversation Friday
Chris Sontag, the recipient of this mail, is Vice-President and general manager of the SCOsource, responsible for (as his company page puts it) overseeing the development and licensing of SCO's immense intellectual property holdings..
Chris:
I know you were going totalk to Bob later Friday, but I figured I would outline the issues.
Bob Bench is is the Chief Financial Officer of the SCO group. He is in the Cc line.
Mike Anderer is a consultant with an outfit called S2 that bills itself as a Strategic Consulting firm, in their M&A group. His name is in SCO's SEC filings.
1) Baystar is easy as they were just a Microsoft referral and would be 2%
Baystar Capital is a venture-capital firm. In 2003 SCO got about fifty million dollars from them in a deal that was rumored to have Microsoft's hand behind it. This confirms the rumor.
2) Any licensing deal would be at 5%
3) Much of the other work would go from 2% to 3% as I have engaged in direct, but this would require according to Bob either Darl or you signing off on the fact that this ane was not a referral.
4) On the patent side for IPX, where foes that fit it. I am working with the lawyers to get these moved from provisional to more complete in the next week. I think it will spawn at least 3 patents. Ed and I are the inventors on these. What do we fo here
This is mysterious. IPX is a network stack developed by Novell. The implication is that Mike Anderer thinks SCO might be able to get a patent lock on it, so they were looking for IP leverage against Novell.
5) The RedHat, Acrylis examiniation, there is no upside here is this billable seperatly. I bought a PC and loaded up RedHat and will take that over and work through it with the Lawfirm. What do we do here?
Acrylis is a company that Caldera (which became SCO) partnered with in 2001. The ongoing lawsuit between Red Hat and SCO is documented here.
I realize the last negotiations are not as much fun, but Microsoft will have brough in $86 million for us including Baystar. The next deal we should be able to get from $16-20, but it will be brutial as it is for go to makerket work and some licences. I know we can do this , if everyone stays on board and still wants to do a deal. I just want to get this deal and move away from corp dev and out into the marketing andfield dollars....In this market we can get $3-5 million in incremental deals and not have to go through the gauntlet which will get tougher next week with the SR VP's.
This is the smoking gun. We now know that Microsoft raised at least $86 million for SCO, but according to the SCO conference call this morning (03 Mar 2004) their cash reserves were $68.5 million. If not for Microsoft, SCO would be at least $15 million in debt today.
The "$16 to $20" is almost certainly $16 to $20 million, and since this memo is five months old that deal is almost certainly completed by now. This means it's possible SCO has burned through as much as $30 million in just a year of barratry.
The part that starts I just want is interesting, too. It looks as though Anderer is talking about shopping for a wealthier patron group within Microsoft's corporate hierarchy; SCO has been taking money from Microsoft corp dev (probably corporate development) but the gauntlet of Microsoft's senior vice-presidents is about to make that more difficult. He thinks they can get more money from marketing and field dollars, whatever that is (later paragraphs suggest it's a different group within Microsoft).
We should line up some small acquisitions here to jump start this if we do it. We shoudl also do this ASAP. Microsoft also indicated there was a lot more money out there and they would clearly rather use Baystar "like" entities to
I have had a dish network satellite hookup for about 8 months now. Before that I had cable. I have noly lost my satellite signal 3 times that I have noticed and they all lasted under 5 minutes. Also I only pay $25 a month instead of the near $40 I was paying for cable. To my untrained eye the picture looks better as well. I have a tv card for my pc and use that as a dvr so I don't know about the company provided ones. Since I can't really change channels using my card I would suspect they are better.
Actually I wasn't a troll and what is this crap about the world wide web being invented in europe.. Uh Mosiac was programmed where I work at NCSA in the United States. so having facts just might help a little.
Actually I wasn't a troll and what is this crap about the world wide web being invented in europe.. Uh Mosiac was programmed where I work and NCSA so having facts just might help a little.
" Has Europe moved into another ideological sphere that separates them from the rest of the world, and if so what is it?"
Lame and useless.:) No really name a single usefull thing to come out of europe in the last twenty years. They invent nothing and the art and music is atrocious. We get about one killer film a year from France and that's about it. You could pretty much whipe europe off the face of the earth and nobody else would be affected.
I'll start off by saying the only parts I liked about it was the connections to the old series. I thought they handled those well.ie why the battlestar had such old looking tech on it, etc.
Above all else it was austondingly boring. Nothing happens for long strectches of time but lame conversations between wooden characters. Then finally woohoo a fight. Watch the missle really slowly fly toward it's target. Watch it slowly explode. Watch people slowly die. Watch people slowly mourn. Sheesh the whole 4 hours could have been compressed into 1/2 hour and would have been tons better.
On top of that they have these cool looking cylons but show them for about 20 seconds during the entire thing but show us loads of the sexbot cylons.
And don't get me started on the stupid camera zooming around all the time. What did they get that from the "my childs first movie" school of filmaking.
The effects were done well
What possible conclusions can you possibly draw from this? Most of the candidates probably don't even know they have a website. Somebody in their campaign hires a firm to stick up a website and they do. This has nothing to do with the polititcs of the candidates.
Slashdot Mirror
--- From the mailbox of chris sontag
From: Mike Anderer
Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003
To: csontag@sco.com
CC: Bob Bench
Subject: Conversation Friday
Chris Sontag, the recipient of this mail, is Vice-President and general manager of the SCOsource, responsible for (as his company page puts it) overseeing the development and licensing of SCO's immense intellectual property holdings..
Chris:
I know you were going totalk to Bob later Friday, but I figured I would
outline the issues.
Bob Bench is is the Chief Financial Officer of the SCO group. He is in the Cc line.
Mike Anderer is a consultant with an outfit called S2 that bills itself as a Strategic Consulting firm, in their M&A group. His name is in SCO's SEC filings.
1) Baystar is easy as they were just a Microsoft referral and would be 2%
Baystar Capital is a venture-capital firm. In 2003 SCO got about fifty million dollars from them in a deal that was rumored to have Microsoft's hand behind it. This confirms the rumor.
2) Any licensing deal would be at 5%
3) Much of the other work would go from 2% to 3% as I have engaged in
direct, but this would require according to Bob either Darl or you
signing off on the fact that this ane was not a referral.
4) On the patent side for IPX, where foes that fit it. I am working
with the lawyers to get these moved from provisional to more complete in
the next week. I think it will spawn at least 3 patents. Ed and I are
the inventors on these. What do we fo here
This is mysterious. IPX is a network stack developed by Novell. The implication is that Mike Anderer thinks SCO might be able to get a patent lock on it, so they were looking for IP leverage against Novell.
5) The RedHat, Acrylis examiniation, there is no upside here is this
billable seperatly. I bought a PC and loaded up RedHat and will take
that over and work through it with the Lawfirm. What do we do here?
Acrylis is a company that Caldera (which became SCO) partnered with in 2001. The ongoing lawsuit between Red Hat and SCO is documented here.
I realize the last negotiations are not as much fun, but Microsoft will
have brough in $86 million for us including Baystar. The next deal we
should be able to get from $16-20, but it will be brutial as it is for
go to makerket work and some licences. I know we can do this , if
everyone stays on board and still wants to do a deal. I just want to
get this deal and move away from corp dev and out into the marketing
andfield dollars....In this market we can get $3-5 million in
incremental deals and not have to go through the gauntlet which will get
tougher next week with the SR VP's.
This is the smoking gun. We now know that Microsoft raised at least $86 million for SCO, but according to the SCO conference call this morning (03 Mar 2004) their cash reserves were $68.5 million. If not for Microsoft, SCO would be at least $15 million in debt today.
The "$16 to $20" is almost certainly $16 to $20 million, and since this memo is five months old that deal is almost certainly completed by now. This means it's possible SCO has burned through as much as $30 million in just a year of barratry.
The part that starts I just want is interesting, too. It looks as though Anderer is talking about shopping for a wealthier patron group within Microsoft's corporate hierarchy; SCO has been taking money from Microsoft corp dev (probably corporate development) but the gauntlet of Microsoft's senior vice-presidents is about to make that more difficult. He thinks they can get more money from marketing and field dollars, whatever that is (later paragraphs suggest it's a different group within Microsoft).
We should line up some small acquisitions here to jump start this if we
do it. We shoudl also do this ASAP. Microsoft also indicated there was
a lot more money out there and they would clearly rather use Baystar
"like" entities to
I have had a dish network satellite hookup for about 8 months now. Before that I had cable. I have noly lost my satellite signal 3 times that I have noticed and they all lasted under 5 minutes. Also I only pay $25 a month instead of the near $40 I was paying for cable. To my untrained eye the picture looks better as well. I have a tv card for my pc and use that as a dvr so I don't know about the company provided ones. Since I can't really change channels using my card I would suspect they are better.
Actually I wasn't a troll and what is this crap about the world wide web being invented in europe.. Uh Mosiac was programmed where I work at NCSA in the United States. so having facts just might help a little.
Actually I wasn't a troll and what is this crap about the world wide web being invented in europe.. Uh Mosiac was programmed where I work and NCSA so having facts just might help a little.
" Has Europe moved into another ideological sphere that separates them from the rest of the world, and if so what is it?" Lame and useless. :) No really name a single usefull thing to come out of europe in the last twenty years. They invent nothing and the art and music is atrocious. We get about one killer film a year from France and that's about it. You could pretty much whipe europe off the face of the earth and nobody else would be affected.
I'll start off by saying the only parts I liked about it was the connections to the old series. I thought they handled those well.ie why the battlestar had such old looking tech on it, etc. Above all else it was austondingly boring. Nothing happens for long strectches of time but lame conversations between wooden characters. Then finally woohoo a fight. Watch the missle really slowly fly toward it's target. Watch it slowly explode. Watch people slowly die. Watch people slowly mourn. Sheesh the whole 4 hours could have been compressed into 1/2 hour and would have been tons better. On top of that they have these cool looking cylons but show them for about 20 seconds during the entire thing but show us loads of the sexbot cylons. And don't get me started on the stupid camera zooming around all the time. What did they get that from the "my childs first movie" school of filmaking. The effects were done well
Aren't justified at this point in blowing up the SCO offices with all people in them :)
To be both stupid and evil must be an interesting combination.
This sentence is being uttered:
"You shall never steal back my drone helicopter, Mr. Bond."
What possible conclusions can you possibly draw from this? Most of the candidates probably don't even know they have a website. Somebody in their campaign hires a firm to stick up a website and they do. This has nothing to do with the polititcs of the candidates.