On 5/9/2011 8:18 PM, S. Dale Morrey wrote: > Anyone want to take a crack at explaining how terminating a large > portion of your workforce and moving your headquarters works to make > you more competitive? I mean is it a leanness issue? Also what > exactly is Novell doing now days? It says they are trimming down > unneeded departments, but as far as I knew the departments that were > getting cut out were what Novell did? What do they plan on doing now? > My guess, from what limited experience I have, is that it is an effort to make the company look more viable in order to sell its assets. This is typical of financial firms that buy out large corporations (and by large I mean anywhere over 250 employees, which isn't large in a lot of definitions). It's also important to note that they have a lot of other holdings that can scale into Novell's internal needs well, especially when moving official HQ. Things like HR/Legal/Accounting tend to scale very well after a certain point, and a lot of those departments were in the layoffs, though I imagine most of the list hears most news about the tech positions.
Employees are typically your greatest cost so cutting them makes you spend less on the books. Other assets like hardware, rent, utilities, they all get rolled into other areas of accounting messes to make them do things like depreciate or get written off in taxes somewhere. So this does improve their balance sheets quite nicely. As for what Novell does, I haven't known that for a long time, actually. I've interfaced with them twice since they went all Linux, and both times their proposition for services vs the cost made me just go with Microsoft or find some startup solution that met my needs. (Case in point: Zimbra. Meets all the needs for the 110 person company I was running at the time for 1/8th the cost of Novell's groupware ensemble) Someone else will have to make the case for their business motions. -Tod Hansmann /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
