Novell Kicked Out of the S&P 500 Index

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2011-05-02 07:49:25 UTC
Modified: 2011-05-02 07:49:25 UTC

Summary: Victory declared by "Novell Boycott" now that Novell is officially off the market

ACCORDING to this press release, Standard & Poor's is removing NOVL. Yes, just like SCO (SCOX) at the time, Novell is going off the face of the Earth (not even "The Pink Sheet"). And as noted at the time, it is not looking good for Novell, but it's inevitable now that the company breaks apart and becomes just a set of patents and products for others to exploit. Here is some coverage [1, 2, 3] which says that "Chipotle is replacing meandering networking dinosaur Novell now that it's being taken private." There has also been a lot of coverage that mentioned this as a side issue [1, 2]. The original announcement says:

S&P MidCap 400 constituent Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. (NYSE: CMG) will replace Novell Inc. (NASD:NOVL) in the S&P 500 index, and UTi Worldwide Inc. (NASD:UTIW) will replace Chipotle Mexican Grill in the S&P MidCap 400 index after the close of trading on a date to be announced. Novell is being acquired by a group of private equity firms in a transaction expected to be completed soon, pending final conditions.

An article titled "Time to Sell Novell?" was published and later removed by Motley Fool (just shortly before the sale) and Sam Varghese published a good article which started thusly: "Novell ceased to exist as a public entity at the end of trading in the US on Wednesday as the sale of the company to Attachmate Corporation was closed."

Interestingly enough, the company which replaces NOVL at the S&P 500 is under investigation. Were they too corrupt (Novell has a history of fraud)?

While the world celebrates the death of Osama Bin Laden "Novell Boycott" celebrates the death of Novell. We shall address other aspects of this milestone in a later post. ⬆

Comments

twitter

2011-05-02 22:08:52

I'm not celebrating Microsoft's victory. It's good that Novell can no longer be used for free software community astroturf purposes and the mono plot will probably die. What's not good is that Microsoft's various plots have finally succeeded in "slaughtering" their competitor. Even when Novell won in court, the weight of Microsoft's Word Perfect, SCO and other scams ruined Novell. Developers and users who cared was pushed aside and livelihoods were lost. Suse stands neglected and polluted. Hoverspan and others who helped Microsoft betray the free software community and Novell were enriched. I'll be happy when more of these wrongs are righted.

In the mean time, Novell and SCO stand as examples of that happens to tech companies that cooperate with Microsoft. There is a new skeleton laying at Microsoft's feet.
TemporalBeing

2011-05-02 17:56:26

This has hardly anything to do with Novell being 'broken' apart, and everything to do with the fact that it is not _privately_ owned. S&P, NYSE, etc are all concerned with only _publicly_ owned companies, so given the sale, this makes perfect sense. What may be surprising is S&P having to announce it, as opposed to the Novell/Attachmate announcing it as part of the sale - or may be Attachmate was a little delusional about trying to keep it on the S&P?

In contract, SCOG was delisted because they couldn't keep their share price above a certain minimum long enough, namely due to their bad business practices.

Just saying, the two are hardly comparable.

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2011-05-02 18:02:54

Yes, I know. The comparison I was making was a comparison of neighbouring companies turning rogue and then losing their place in the public market, at least after a while. I should add that for Novell to stay in Wall Street has been a struggle for years and it was nearly delisted from NASDAQ several times over the past 5 years.

Novell Kicked Out of the S&P 500 Index

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts