This morning I saw a tweet from Jan Wildeboer of Fedora. He was one of the first people to spot that Novell are facing an unsolicited takeover bid by bigtime hedgefund breadheads, Elliott. A quick Google shows that Elliott specialises in buying into struggling companies and enforcing radical changes in order to bring the price of their investment up.
I have to admit, i’m mostly ignorant about how these bid and takeover deals work. What I do know is that Novell is listed on the US stock exchange, and that means they are legally bound to look after the financial interests of the shareholders. Even if that is at the cost of the company, it’s values, employees or products. I’ve read about the valuations of the Elliott offer being in the Billions of dollars. An offer of that magnitude is definitely going to be a catalyst. The company is “in play” as the Americans might put it. The thing is, with one offer on the table, Novell’s management are obligated to consider rival offers. Which naturally leads you to consider the simple question, who?
HP have interests in Open Source and Infrastructure, and they could bid. Oracle are still digesting Sun, so are not in such a strong position, but IBM might try. I have wondered about Google, but somehow I can’t see it.
There is one possibility that gives me the shivers though. Microsoft. It would be a lot of hassle for them to get a deal past the US Anti Trust Laws. It would cost them a lot of money in an area of business that would be a nightmare to intergrate into their own. So much so that I wonder if they would bother. The answer that’s forming in my mind is they wouldn’t. SO where’s the logic? Well, despite what Boycott Novell might say, Novell push a lot of usefull stuff into Linux. I’m sure that if they weren’t contributing, the overall pace of Linux development would be slowed significantly.
So, is that what we might be looking at? Would MS spend a Billion Dollars to trip Linux up and slow it down? I think they just might.
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I think Microsoft may spend a Billion dollars on Novell. But not to slow it down.
They have spent money on embracing Novell products. They basically sell SLES. They wrote code to improve the interopability of their products.
I don’t think Microsoft thinks that they can ever “get” the server market. I think they see that Linux is where the server money is, so they want to get a share of that money, as every company would.
I think it would be against Microsofts interests if Novell would fall victim to a corporate raider or stop their Linux business. Microsoft doesn’t not like Linux because it’s not Windows (that’s the reason many Linux users like Linux though), but because it makes them earn less money. I think Microsoft has given up on the “let’s kill Free Software” approach, but rather went to some kind of “if you cant kill it, join it”.
Linux is not threatening their desktop market right now, at least not as strong as Apple does. They constatntly improve interopability with the major Linux server players.
Novell would be a great buy for them I think. They’d even get some excellent .NET developers and a very permissively licensed .NET framework “for free”. Maybe they just didn’t buy them yet because they fear an anti trust lawsuit?
One last thing: Novell may be a big player in the Free Software ecosystem, but they still mainly are an infrastructure company. You don’t buy Tesco to make them stop selling vegetables, do you?
If Microsoft is behind this offer (which I highly doubt), then only to help Novell embrace their Open Source business.
I misused the word embrace in my post I think. Just replace it with “promote”