Bonum Certa Men Certa

Stephen Pollack (PlateSpin CEO) Quits Novell; More Shuffles in Canada

Management leaves the struggling former network juggernaut

Halloween hand
Adios!



Pollack is a figure whom we mentioned here before [1, 2, 3] because his company got devoured after a rather mysterious Novell acquisition that hardly made strategic sense at the time. Not much news has come since then, so to be brutally frank, it does not seem as though Novell made progress this way. It just needed to show its investors some concrete signs that it was changing and not staying idle while big losses carried on. Jack Messman, after all, was probably pressured out for being too passive.



It wasn't long ago that Mark Pileski and Brett Johnson -- both PlateSpin seniors -- quit Novell. The former CEO of PlateSpin has been dancing a little with multiple companies recently [1, 2] and now it's confirmed that he quit Novell.

So why did Pollack leave Novell? Was it time? And what are his future plans? I was able to catch up with him briefly, and asked him these very questions.

[...]

Pollack stayed on with Novell after the acquisition but has since left. Recently, his name surfaced again in the media and the blogosphere when he joined the Advisor Board of two startup virtualization companies: Embotics and Enomaly.


Didn't Novell see it as an obligation to inform shareholders about this fairly major departure?

“Didn't Novell see it as an obligation to inform shareholders about this fairly major departure?”This is actually similar to this month's departure of a Senior Vice President (SVP) at Microsoft, who came to the monopolist after the acquisition of aQuantive where he was the CEO. Microsoft made almost nothing out of aQuantive and it continues losing billions of dollars online.

Speaking of SVPs, Novell's Roger Levy, who will continue to report to Jeff Jaffe, is Novell's Senior Vice President mostly responsible for strategy (and probably a major part of the PlateSpin decision). His remit or role is being extended to more areas right now and recently he had a sort of an interview with the Var Guy about these. We also remarked on Novell's direction under Justin Steinman's increased power in leadership. Both him and Levy have made some damning statements that we covered in the past, so there's reason for cautious concern.

There are other new moves in Novell that are worth noting, such as this one. Novell continues to suffer a leadership instability in Canada (too many head-changes).

With the promotion of Katie McAuliff to vice-president of channels, Novell Americas, Novell Canada turned to a long-time Novell mainstay in tapping the subsidiary's chief technology officer, Ross Chevalier, to lead the Canadian operation.


We previously mentioned Ross Chevalier in [1, 2, 3, 4] and we also caught him breathing down a blogger's neck. Ross was also so 'keen' on promoting 'Freedom' that in October he said that “It’s not about replacing Windows with Linux, it’s about making it dead simple for the two to work together.”

Would Microsoft say that its intentions or ideas are "not about replacing Linux with Windows?" Novell seems to have been bamboozled if it's too naive to spot Microsoft's Linux FUD ("Get the Facts" is still alive). Novell has already pulled its pages that put down Windows. It targets Red Hat and UNIX instead.

Recent Techrights' Posts

OpenBSD Says That Even on Linux, Wayland Still Has a Number of Rough Edges (But IBM Wants to Make X Extinct)
IBM tries to impose unready software on users
Professor Eben Moglen on How Social Control Media Metabolises Humans and Constraints Freedom of Thought
Nothing of value would be lost if all these data-harvesting giants (profiling people) vanished overnight
 
Links 28/11/2023: New Zealand's Big Tobacco Pivot and Google Mass-Deleting Accounts
Links for the day
Justice is Still the Main Goal
The skulduggery seems to implicate not only Microsoft
[Teaser] Next Week's Part in the Series About Anti-Free Software Militants
an effort to 'cancel' us and spy on us
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news
Permacomputing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 27, 2023
IRC logs for Monday, November 27, 2023
When Microsoft Blocks Your Access to Free Software
"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." [Chicago Sun-Times]
Techrights Statement on 'Cancel Culture' Going Out of Control
relates to a discussion we had in IRC last night
Stuff People Write About Linux
revisionist pieces
Links 28/11/2023: Rosy Crow 1.4.3 and Google Drive Data Loss
Links for the day
Links 27/11/2023: Australian Wants Tech Companies Under Grip
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news
Links 27/11/2023: Underwater Data Centres and Gemini, BSD Style!
Links for the day
[Meme] Leaning Towards the Big Corporate CoC
Or leaning to "the green" (money)
Software Freedom Conservancy Inc in 2022: Almost Half a Million Bucks for Three People Who Attack Richard Stallman and Defame Linus Torvalds
Follow the money
[Meme] Identity Theft and Forgery
Coming soon...
Microsoft Has Less Than 1,000 Mail (MX) Servers Left, It's Virtually Dead in That Area (0.19% of the Market)
Exim at 254,000 servers, Postfix at 150,774, Microsoft down to 824
The Web is Dying, Sites Must Evolve or Die Too
Nowadays when things become "Web-based" it sometimes means more hostile and less open than before
Still Growing, Still Getting Faster
Articles got considerably longer too (on average)
In India, the One Percent is Microsoft and Mozilla
India is where a lot of software innovations and development happen, so this kind of matters a lot
Feeding False Information Using Sockpuppet Accounts and Imposters
online militants try every trick in the book, even illegal stuff
What News Industry???
Marketing, spam, and chatbots
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, November 26, 2023
IRC logs for Sunday, November 26, 2023
The Software Freedom Law Center's Eben Moglen Explains That We Already Had Free Software Almost Everywhere Before (Half a Century Ago)
how code was shared in the 1970s and 80s
When the So-called 'Cancel Culture' Sees Everything in Free Software Through the Scopes of 'Sex' (Because It Cannot Argue on Technical or Legal Grounds)
Losing the plot
Links 26/11/2023: Debunking So-called G.A.I. and Sierra Leone's National Curfew
Links for the day
In the 'Phoronix Universe', Single Job Openings at AMD Are News, But Not ~400 Layoffs
like a classifieds section
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news
Microsoft Shamelessly Attacks Both Git and Projects in GitHub, Using Plagiarism in "AI" Clothing (Exit GitHub Now!)
A mountain of plagiarism
Microsoft Loses Market Share, Market Price of Windows Plunges to Almost Nothing (28 Dollars for Vista 10)
GNU/Linux has grown so potent that Microsoft now charges only dozens of bucks for Vista 10
Professor Eben Moglen Stands with Snowden While Moglen's 'Critics' (Microsofters) Keep Defaming Prominent Whistleblowers
Don't listen to Microsoft liars and weasels, who merely try to "replace" Moglen and override his message
"Check Point" + Microsoft Partnerships Extend to Anti-GNU/Linux FUD
a close partner/pusher of Microsoft tries to alter the narrative (change reality itself)
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, November 25, 2023
IRC logs for Saturday, November 25, 2023
Links 26/11/2023: Fresh Concerns Over North Korea Satellite Ambitions and South China Sea Patrols
Links for the day
Eben Moglen Explains the Connection Between FSF and SFLC (Both of Which Under Attack by Microsofters)
Old clip