Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Micro Focus is an insanely weird company. It’s just a strange mix of software companies collected during the years, seamingly without any sort of overall plan.

View on HN

There have been a bunch of companies like that over the years. See also CA. What tends to happen is someone has a grand vision of how this acquisition with dovetail neatly with the existing portfolio and the integration gets only part-way there, strategies or the market shifts, and you're left with yet another product that sells enough to keep plugging along but doesn't really fit with anything else.

I don’t think MicroFocus is really organized around integration..it’s more of a PE/holding company like Vista (?imo). The problem remains that they bought the entirety of HP’s software portfolio and transformed it to a declining legacy market valuation. I would not be surprised if a Vertica IPO would raise more than MicroFocus market capitalization (~$2B) and debt ($4B) combined...sort of like SUSE in this case. AWS deal should help, but in reality the mix of holdings doesn’t make sense to me and several of their properties would make more sense standing alone.

Don't forget they also hold the copyright to UNIX[1]. They're doing absolutely nothing with it, presumably other than collecting royalties from Xinuos.

[1] https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2018/11/26/why-bsd-os-is-...

The whole business of Novell retaining the copyrights to UNIX when they transferred other rights to SCO may have been the most weird twist of a generally surreal case.

I wonder if we'll ever really know the whole backstory here. SCO pretty clearly messed up big time but did their lawyers just screw up or did SCO decide this was a detail to be dealt with later?

Interesting read. What could you do with the copyright to UNIX?

Seems they are following the nigerian price playbook - buying customers not technology. The worse the tech is, the better are the customers still using it. And divesting suse when they realized it has enduring value.

this seems like a garbage comment bud

Reply on news.ycombinator.com