What if...

Summary: A quick roundup of Novell news from this week, ranging from bad news to neutral news

NOVELL is making many headlines this week, partly because it might be sold [1, 2] (another obvious factor being Brainshare). Here is some of the news we have not covered yet.

First of all, LANDesk is up for sale, just like Novell.

The company began in 1985 in Provo as the networking of computers -- connecting them all together -- was taking off, thanks largely to Novell's software.

Secondly, Novell's SUSE being dumped in Kuwait [1, 2, 3] (not to worry, they stay with GNU/Linux, but only Red Hat's) is still an event that receives press coverage [1, 2].

By using a 12 gigawatt power generation grid, MEW serves Over 800,000 consumers. The migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux happened in order to address the Kuwait’s need for increased power capacity.

Novell must be jealous. All this news coverage gave observers the impression that Red Hat is evidently better than SUSE -- enough to be worth switching distributions.

Thirdly, Cliff Saran’s FUD blog covers Pulse, which most of the press has neglected by now. There is no news about it from Novell.

This could be the start of a trend...BT's internal project and the Novell Pulse application are two examples of web 2.0 UIs for the enterprise.

There is too much competition in this area, so Novell is just riding Google's Wave. It's hardly a recipe for success.

Down in New Zealand, Novell is being wooed by a local company (last year we learned that "the New Zealand arm of the [Novell] business will soon be sold to internal staff") and there are interesting numbers at the end:

Trans-Tasman consulting and professional services company Directory Concepts hopes to secure a franchise to represent Novell in New Zealand.

Directory Concepts was established in Australia in 1999 and it was officially incorporated locally last August.

[...]

The vendor incorporated its local operation in 1996. Its revenue has fallen from $8.4 million for the year ended October 2005 to $1.6 million for the year ended October 2008, according to filings with the Companies Office website last July. In 2005 Novell’s local operation posted an after-tax profit of $1.04 million, but recorded a $134,938 after tax loss in the 2008 financial year, according to these records.

Internationally, Novell recently rejected a bid by hedge fund Elliott Associates to take the company private.

It's not over yet. We consider it quite likely that Microsoft will bid to buy Novell, from which it's already generating income (SUSE patent tax). How much income is being generated for Microsoft by Novell? Our reader Wayne wonders about that but he applies logic to the Microsoft vs HTC/Android case:

So why would HTC pay Microsoft? They wouldn’t. What I suspect happened (and we’ll never know the truth because there’s a non-disclosure agreement in place) is that Microsoft paid HTC a large sum of money, and then HTC agreed to pay a small sum of money per phone sold. Just for the argument, assume that Microsoft paid HTC $25,000,000.00 for access to HTC’s patents, and HTC is to pay Microsoft $0.001 per phone sold…

As we showed over a week ago, Xandros pays Microsoft $50 for copies of Xandros (with so-called 'protection') and 'Microsoft Enderle' estimates that HTC pays Microsoft dozens of dollars for each Linux phone sold. People should not buy Android phones from HTC anymore. To buy them is to accept Microsoft's racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. ⬆