Bonum Certa Men Certa

Novell Results Are in: Net is Down Very Sharply (36%)

Sell Novell



FORECASTS [1] and waiting games [2] are both over. Novell's latest results are in and they are no better than the last quarter's (revealing that Novell operates at a considerable loss).

So first of all -- let's start with the good news. Novell employees needn't worry about Ron, who received a $6.9 million compensation plan for his 'wonderful' achievements. It was similar two years ago.



But what are these achievements? Driving the company to this?

Novell Inc.'s (NOVL) fiscal first-quarter net income fell 36% on sharply lower interest income as invoicing fell short of expectations.


Here are the earnings figures:

For the first quarter, the company reported earnings of $10.7 million, or 3 cents a share, compared with $16.8 million, or 5 cents a share, in the year-ago period.


Revenue is down too:

Novell reported net revenue of $215 million, compared to $231 million previous year. Ten Wall Street analysts expected revenues of $229.95 million.


This pretty much confirms what we already know about the layoff because the company must explain to investors what it will do next. Novell has already laid off at least 25 SUSE-focused employees. They would have cost about 25 x $70,000 = $1.75m to keep per year. So they could, in principle, work for 4 years with a good wage at the expense of that "compensation" for Ron Hovsepian. How does it feel to be shafted by the very same management that sold out to Steve Ballmer, who is already busy suing Linux [1, 2]?

“Did they learn nothing from those FAT patents?”Meanwhile, elsewhere inside the company, Novell is making .NET more popular. Did they learn nothing from those FAT patents? Is Novell just another Microsoft department now? One that's producing Windows software like NetWare and some Microsoft 'plugins' or Microsoft 'addons' for GNU/Linux (Mono, Moonlight)? For that task, Microsoft must be inside GNU/Linux, hence the alliance with Novell. They get to be inside SUSE, they have indirect membership in places like the Linux Foundation [1, 2, 3] and that's just the tip of the iceberg. They gag critics that way. Even Red Hat must keep polite now.

As a side note, since everyone is talking about TomTom at the moment, it's worth emphasising that this patent situation shows precisely what Microsoft might do with Mono and Moonlight and why it wants them inside GNU/Linux (Moonlight brings Mono with it to desktops like KDE). Novell increasingly focuses on Microsoft technologies. One of our readers said one hour ago that he tried "compiling mono from SVN on [his] gentoo box and it crashes with a sigsegv in the make process."

The reader claims: "I go ask at #mono (on the gnome irc network) and miguel says 'gentoo is eternally broken'."

That's nice. On the face of it, the only thing that's "eternally broken" is Novell. And to quote other people, “Novell Is bleeding to death.” ____

[1] The Outlook

Computer maker Dell Inc., retailer Kohl’s and software developer Novell Inc. of Waltham report quarterly financial results.


[2] Dell, Gap, Kohl's, Novell on earnings deck

Novell Inc., which provides open source software for businesses, is foreseen posting fiscal first-quarter earnings of 6 cents a share on revenue of $227.4 million. Its shares were up 1.2% at $3.34.

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