On Friday 13 January 2006 04:16 pm, Kaj Haulrich wrote: > On Friday 13 January 2006 20:49, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: > > Al & Destiny wrote: > > > I Hope I've managed to re-subscribe. > > > > > > What is it with Mandriva? Do they not want customers anymore????? Why > > > are they un-subscribing people all the time? > > > > > > Are they trying to drive people to other distros?
In short Mandrake had a business model that failed. Their former business model was to take GNU code and combine it with a small amount of propriety code, integrate the code and attempt to correct the errors. introduced by integration and then sell this code back to computer types. This model failed because: Mandrake did not do a very good job of integration and correcting code. And! The computer jockeys who write the code DO NOT need to buy the code they wrote back. Either or both of these spell financial failure. At that point instead of attempting to ascertain who prospective customers of their product are Mandrake merged with 2 companies - Conectiva in Brazil and a North America firm. This of course compounded their initial market place failure by now establishing a firm that is located not only in Europe but has major groups in North America. Translation you have basically three groups in Mandriva one group basically speaks English, one group French, and one group Brazilian Portuguese ie. three culture groups, three locations, and three ideas of how to assemble a distribution. Plus you have all the normal non cultural issue of integrating three companies into one. And! That to a company that just emerged from bankruptcy. So what is the first order of business. Cut employees. Ten percent deduction in labor force in one location may not create issues of retained employees having a historical knowledge of what is where [think physical], who is doing what, where, and when. Currently according to the accountants profits at Mandriva are positive but are they really positive? Meaning can the current level of positive profits be maintained while retiring the debt accumulated by acquisitions. Historical high technology companies do not do well by acquisition and integration. Just to difficult. So what to do. Cut cost anyway possible. Which is fine and well but Mandriva along with SuSE and Red Hat still has not realized that tackies have the ability to install any number of Linux distributions and why not these are the people who are writing the programs - so what do the tackies need Mandriva for? They do not. Now since Mandriva brings nothing to the table for a business man - to filled with issues that stop programs from running out of the box which are no challenge to tackies but are show stoppers to business types. So the business types have no interest in buying the product either. That leaves only cost cutting again which produces the issues you are questioning their sanity about. The only comment one can add to this is look for more such issues as nothing has been done to solve the major problem. Good example. Subscription model. Good idea but look at the cost. Now realize that for a Brazilian in local currency that cost would be the equivalent of a North American paying around $1,500 for a basic subscription. Ain't gonna happen. I not going going to pay $US for something I can basically download for free from SuSE, Red Hat, Gentoo et. So to me what you are looking at is a business model that is fastly headed south all the way to where it is nice and cold for permanent winter storage. SOTL ____________________________________________________ Want to buy your Pack or Services from Mandriva? Go to http://store.mandriva.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrivaclub.com ____________________________________________________
