Bonum Certa Men Certa

Rumour: Novell Layoffs Next Month

Further to the previous post, which spoke about revealing comments, here comes another rumour that can get people at Novell upset. The following I did not know: does Novell intend to lay off employees next month?

You people aren't acquainted with Novell. It is one of the worst-managed companies ever--employees who have tried to to innovate usually find instant defeat. If anyone from Novell is patrolling blogs it is certainly not a company-managed effort. In fact, most employees are stressed about the upcoming October layoffs.


Can anyone confirm this? Having just searched the Web, the 2005 layoffs are all that comes up [1, 2, 3]. There was certainly nothing about new layoffs in the press (not recently anyway) and Bruce Lowry fought against our arguments that Novell is losing staff, despite the fact that we recorded evidence of layoffs in this site (some of them this year).

If the above is true, then Bruce will have to eat humble pie. I can't say that we'll have "the last laugh" because unemployment is nothing to joke about and the misery of Novell developers, as opposed to management that sold out, is not something which I would -- personally -- take any pleasure in. I've said it before (probably elsewhere) and I'll say it again: Ron Hovsepian deserves to be sacked for not realising the consequences of that terrible deal with Microsoft. He should have listened more closely to Jeremey Allison and some of the other prominent developers. He received warnings about this deal.

What should Novell ideally do? The company seems to be trapped now, but maybe it can apologise and escape this irrevocable deal somehow. It's unrealistic, surely, and it would take a long time to recover, but Novell will probably drop into oblivion if it believes that a 'second-class Windows' (OOXML translator is not OOXML, Mono is not .NET, Moonlight is not Silverlight) will be appreciated by clients.

Novell seems to be lacking leadership and inspiration. Even Novell's key evangelist, Reverend Ted, is clearly irreplaceable (Novell sought a replacement days ago) and he has moved on to podcasting elsewhere. Good luck to Ted!

If staffing reduction is anything to go by and if the above rumour is true, then Novell might be the next SCO. Earlier today I notices that Sam Hiser had created a new category in his blog, aptly named "SCOVell".

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