Summary: Levy and Jaffe are quitting Novell, 4 business units become just 2

MICROSOFT and Novell share another common problem. Both companies lose top managers at a relatively rapid pace (Microsoft's latest was its CFO). Sometimes they even swap managers but only in the sense that Microsoft managers become Novell managers [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8].

About a week ago we wrote about Novell losing enormous amounts of money. It is looking grim.

Jeff Jaffe, one of the architects of the Novell-Microsoft deal [1, 2], is preparing to leave Novell and so is Roger Levy, who was spreading GNU/Linux FUD in order to sell SLE*. The Register says that Novell "would be consolidating from four different business units down to two." Additionally:

As part of the reorganization, Roger Levy, senior vice president of strategic development and formerly the general manager of the SUSE Linux business at Novell, is leaving the company. Jeff Jaffe, a former researcher at IBM and Bell Labs who was hired to be an executive vice president and CTO for Novell in November 2005, will stay on as "strategic advisor" to Hovsepian, but on February 1, 2010, he will be leaving the company.

The comments are worth reading too. "Their MS deal was obviously an act of desperation on their part and a token gesture on ms part to keep up the pretence that they have competition in the market," says one person. Another person adds that "Novell only has 3,600 employees. A bigger fish out there somewhere must be keeping a watchful eye." That's quite possible and we wrote about possible acquirers before. Is Novell paying Ron Hovsepian monstrous bonuses just to keep him on board?

We will be writing a lot more about it later in the week. ⬆