Should Novell buyout Mandriva?

**panther86** · 22-Jun-2009, 18:03

Well seems like Novell is doing pretty well financially,and suse is just shy of being number 1 distro, hovered over by the great Ubuntu.Suse seems to be one of the easiest, up to date but stable, just works and fast distro (despite just starting, i really like it a lot) Suse also has a lot of popularity and good choices made.

On the other hand, Mandriva has the magic of the desktop too. MCC, easy to use, up to date releases, etc. But problem, mandriva's upper management constantly is shooting themselves in the foot.Same way the 2006 year they dropped from number one to 9, and sorta made they way slightly back to 6 with user trust slowly coming back, but it seems they are starting up again.How Long it took mandriva to give answers Open letter to Mandriva/Mandriva SA | Mandriva Forum was pathetic, and the new story of the day with distrowatch Mandriva at Linuxtag 2009 in Berlin, Germany | Mandriva Forum mandriva's stock price has fell yet again to .19 with Capitalization 2,932,855.58 Euronext - MANDRIVA : Share price Stock price Quotes information that is dirt cheap, and considering how much mandriva gets done with their bare bone staff, all the great software that constantly head to head with SuSe like Mandriva Control Center, the drake tools, super fast URMPI, stable and up to date desktop, yet mandriva is facing a finacial hell that the community is always worrying about future of mandriva or will it close shop tomorrow. Could novell take advantage of this?

Think about how much icing on the cake the new Suse/Mandriva would be with the 2 teams working together.The YaSt team working together with the MCC team, and etc all the competing values working together. We have too many linux distros, and too much effort for giving the same thing. If we can get linux working together slowly starting with Mandriva and Suse, would that be a powerful force? The 2 marketshare combined would top ubuntu giving number 1 position for novell with the home market in the linux world. With mandriva's ability to make the magic software, and Novell strong upper management,i can't see any 2 distros working together any better then these two. Red hat buying mandriva seems very unlikely as fedora and mandriva are in different directions.Suse and mandriva seems like the best chemistry, and mandriva is dirt cheap.

Linux again has too many distros, people trying to make theirs the best when it similar to someone else.It makes it harder to choose a distro, and they are not as polished as if they would be if the man power went together.After all we are all trying to go after the pie of microsoft, but we can never do that with all the ditro wars we are having.

What are your opinions?

**Sagemta** · 22-Jun-2009, 18:23

I'm not sure:
1.The gov'ts involved
2.NOVL's finances are not really enough IMO to absorb Mandriva
3.There'd probably be much resistance to give up yast to MCC & the like as well as customer resistance

**panther86** · 22-Jun-2009, 18:37

the thing is, mandriva community is very unsure about the future of mandriva, it is why the open letter thread made it to 12 pages of begging mandriva to respond, and they threw us a little bone and then went back their cave, then comes linuxtag commotion. Mandriva community is starting to get louder, and are very unhappy with the management, and over the years more and more have just decided to leave. Mandriva fairly close to closing the shop, no innavation with future with the news they give us, it is a very clueless company.I don't see too much community resistance besides the mono no no advocates.I have been in the mandriva community for a while now, so i know what it is like on that side.

Btw Novell has enough money to buy mandriva many times over NOVL: NOVELL INC Stock Quote Novell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

**hendersj** · 22-Jun-2009, 19:36

On Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:26:02 +0000, Sagemta wrote:

> 2.NOVL's finances are not really enough IMO to absorb Mandriv

Well, a billion dollars in the bank is nothing to sneeze at, but I would
prefer Novell continue working on improving its operating margins rather
than have to have those margins eaten up by restructuring costs brought
about from more acquisitions.

In my personal (not professional) opinion, of course.

Jim

**hendersj** · 22-Jun-2009, 19:37

On Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:46:01 +0000, panther86 wrote:

> NOVL: NOVELL
> INC Stock Quote

Market capitalization (which I assume you're referring to here) is not
the same as cash on hand....

Jim

**Sagemta** · 22-Jun-2009, 20:15

One other item I thought is that NOVL isn't very good at marketing.
Madriva is/was as bad or worse. This'd be a case of blind leading the blind.

**panther86** · 22-Jun-2009, 20:25

Mandriva went into bankruptcy not to long ago, and are ready to go again, a crippling company like mandriva should be easy to pick up.

I don't think there would be too much restructring costs, it would be well worth it in the end. Mandriva has their products at very high quality, its the company shoots themselves in the foot all the time, Novell can make sure stupid decisions don't happen.The only thing that would take a bit to do would be merging suse and mandriva, as it would take time to integrate all the features. But again, this would make Novell the leader of linux as far as home use and would knock ubuntu off of the 1 position.

This chart is a bit old Financial Q3 results for 2008 | Mandriva linux and i think mandriva is doing even worse atm as they had to get rid of adam, one of their best and most talented employee that was quickly picked up by red hat.I don't there there is any way mandriva would be too much $$$ for Novell to absorb.Mandriva makes great products that could easily be the money cow, but mandriva doesn't know how, they have a limited box that they can't really think anything outside of it, just like their buyout of connectiva, connectiva had much to offer mandriva, but mandy couldn't think much outside of the acquisition.

if it would be too much for novell to handle at this time, they could easily just do slow phase out, mandriva will still be running on their own under novell for a few years and features slowly start merging together with suse until the goal is complete then do whatever they want with the mandriva brand.heck, they could even make Suse for enterprise only, and make their home edition version and free version the mandriva branding with merged features of both of the current os (kinda like Red Hat and Fedora)

**TaraIkeda** · 22-Jun-2009, 21:28

Maybe not a buyout,. but maybe a merger or partnership would help.
Mandriva is slipping into nothingness, someones going to take up from it...
And I think the one that might pull it out might either Novell or even Canonical.

**panther86** · 22-Jun-2009, 21:43

i would prefer that too, but mandriva is such a tiny company compared to Novell it wouldn't sound right to be a merger with a company that has close to billion dollars and widely known at no 2, while a company at number 6 in debt with low profits ,low revenue, less then 100 employees when novell has 4100 employees.

**swerdna** · 22-Jun-2009, 21:56

Suse is not "just shy of being number 1 distro" if you use google's statistics for searches as a measure. That puts Ubuntu an order of magnitude in front of Suse which itself is way behind Fedora. They're kind of like this:
Ubuntu : Fedora : Suse = 10 : 5 : 1

So if Novell bought Mandriva, that would get it a better hold in the market, maybe change things to like 5: 2.5 : 1.

But I've thought for a long time that Canonical's success is like Microsoft's: great marketing by business-oriented ppl. So it would be better IMO if Novel spent the money it might spend on buying Mandriva, instead spend it on marketing.

Two cents -- back to the cave............