Comments

• ed

  2008-10-15 23:32:48

  Not that I think that NOVL is a good stock to own or the company is in a good financial situation, but bringing up this blip in their share price is pretty ridiculous. It characterizes this site as an anti-Novell FUD site filled with baseless claims. If you actually look at the data from that day, you will see that the share price was very anomalous and not related to any significant volume at all (further evidenced by the immediate jump to $4.xx). If you want to see financial doom, just go through their SEC reports instead...it isn't hard to see that the only money the company has made in the past 5 years or so has come from Microsoft. Linux is their only business unit showing any growth, and that only accounts for less than 10% of their revenue.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2008-10-15 23:46:15

  ed,
  
  We have covered that aspect too, many times in fact.

• AlbertoP

  2008-10-16 00:20:06

  Sometimes I am amazed by how much time you have to notice that minimum which was practically instantaneous, and its meaning tends to zero.
  
  However, with all this time, you don't read plots correctly and publish fake data. Check on google the actual price at the minimum. It was 4, just move your mouse :-)
  
  http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ANOVL

• Jose_X

  2008-10-16 01:51:58

  FWIW
  
  I don't want to get caught up in this discussion, but, for general awareness, know that some graphs tend to miss values depending on how they were constructed. Take a look at this data from yahoo finance: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=NOVL&a=09&b=10&c=2008&d=09&e=10&f=2008&g=d
  
  It marks 3.93 as the low for Oct 10th.

• Betto

  2008-10-16 02:10:13

  @ed:
  
  Roy is a fear peddler, and as such he's taking advantage of a negative event at the macro scale to make waves out of his micro-level focus. He has a buddy on Slashdot (see http://slashdot.org/~SockDisclosure/journal/214377) that has been going on and on the past few weeks (surprise) about how Microsoft (or "M$" as he calls them) are also allegedly dying:
  
  http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=994143&cid=25363873 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=986049&cid=25269343 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=986049&cid=25269377 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=985597&cid=25257089
  
  No comment on the nosedives IBM, Google, Intel and just about every other publicly traded corporation in the planet are taking, of course. It's just Novell and Microsoft that are in trouble, see.
  
  It's a convenient way for people like them to validate their weird theories and further their agendas.

• Shane Coyle

  2008-10-16 02:25:10

  Also worth remembering, regarding the notion of NOVL 'financial doom' and their MS dependency, was this comment by symbolset on the Slashdot discussion of our Jeremy Allison interview:
  
  

  Just days before this deal was announced they had an interesting 8K report filed:
  
  They owed a ton of cash that was due in 2024, but callable in the event they failed timely filing of reports with the SEC. Apparently that Microsoft money saved their bacon on that one, since immediately after the deal was done it was reported the money had already been paid out to debtors. Their SEC reports should make interesting reading for some time to come.
  
  Being paranoid, though, I wonder if their accountants or the debtor or both aren't beholden to Microsoft's business interests in some way. That would be really scary.

  
  
  So, not only has most of their revenue since the deal been MS-originated, but it may be that this MS money kept NOVL out of the abyss in the first place.
  
  Hey, it seemed to work out for Apple way back when...

• xISO_ZWT

  2008-10-16 02:37:34

  novell made it's choice. Not listening to it's users and put all it's eggs into the microsoft bucket. Long term stability or a quick buck. Amazing what the love of money will do.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2008-10-16 02:45:55

  Thanks for that, Shane. I totally missed it.

• Josh Bell

  2008-10-16 10:54:04

  This is what this site does. It is just FUD. Roy and some others on this site just want Novell to die. It doesn't matter to them if Novell contributes to Linux or OOo, it's all poison and has no business being around. He has this problem with stock buybacks so I wonder how he reacts to this little gem about RedHat. http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/stories/2008/10/13/daily12.html.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2008-10-16 11:11:06

  I've known about this for a while. I never claimed things were bright for Red Hat, either. In fact, watch the latest blog post from Mark Shuttleworth.

• AlexH

  2008-10-16 13:10:55

  Things are bright for Red Hat. Stock buy-backs just simply aren't a sign of weakness; not for Red Hat, and not for Novell.
  
  Red Hat are in an extremely strong position at the moment.

• xISO_ZWT

  2008-10-17 10:35:26

  @Josh: Given my personal experience dealing with novell and microsoft, I'd rather read this "FUD" than novell's & ms's fud.

• Josh Bell

  2008-10-17 14:34:48

  @xISO_ZWT: If I may ask what personal experience did you have with them? I've dealt with them two without a bad experience. I have used both Novell and MS products.