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I tried to discover what I could about Elliot Associates, LLP and there is not a whole lot to be found. Their web presence is practically non-existent consisting of a home page and a contact form and little else.

You can read the letter for yourself ( You know I tried to embed the link but they cannot even get this stupid editor correct. The link was to be to finance.yahoo.com. If you google "Novell Elliot" you will find it and it has the full letter published. ) but I am quoting what I think is the most telling paragraph:

"Novell is a long-established company that we have followed closely for a considerable period of time. Over the past several years, the Company has attempted to diversify away from its legacy division with a series of acquisitions and changes in strategic focus that have largely been unsuccessful. As a result, we believe the Company's stock has meaningfully underperformed all relevant indices and peers. With over 33 years of experience in investing in public and private companies and an extensive track record of successfully structuring and executing acquisitions in the technology space, we believe that Elliott is uniquely situated to deliver maximum value to the Company's stockholders on an expedited basis."

The emphasis is mine, but what I read there is that they are going to sell of Novell's assets piecemeal and keep as much of the billion in cash that Novell currently has for themselves.

I don't think any of the current product line is safe from just being flushed into private hands and then quietly buried.

Lets face it, Novell has been in a bad way for a bunch of years now, they have been trying their best, but they really have fallen short. OES2 is not what it should be, They are putting the knife to NetWare ( which I think they should just open source along with NSS before this thing goes through.) and although I love it GroupWise is not gaining ground, even after all the work that has been put into it.

So that really does tell the story. If the Novell Board turns down this offer it is going to turn into a hostile takeover and a proxy fight. They are offering premium pricing and the share holders that have hung in there are going to want to take it since Novell's share price has been lack luster for years.

In short, the Good Ship Novell is being towed to the scrap yard. It has been a lovely cruise and I enjoyed it for over twenty years but unless I am woefully wrong the cruise is over.

In the end no one listened to the great mases of us out there that were begging Novell for years not to do all of the things it did. We were right, Management was wrong and it is sad to be right about this.

If by chance Novell survives this, I hope and pray that the Novell Board FINALLY listens to us and dumps the current management team and gets back to its core strengths of servers and services and stops all this adventuresome nonsense that they have embarked on in the last 5 years and makes Novell back into the company it once was.

God how I miss Ray and Drew

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.