SUSE IPO Disappoints (zdnet.com) 58
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Swedish private equity firm EQT had high hopes for its SUSE IPO on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and set the European Linux and cloud power's IPO price at 30 euros per share. Alas, SUSE's shares opened at 29.50 euros per share. By the close of business on May 20th, the stock crept up to 30.39 euros. This gave it a market cap of around 5 billion euros (approximately $6.1 billion). This is nothing to sneeze at, but it wasn't what EQT hoped for either. Before the IPO, EQT had sought an IPO price as high as 34 euros per share. Still, this was no failure. SUSE and its backers sold 37.8 million shares in the IPO, for 1.1 billion euros. EQT is still keeping a stake. SUSE itself continues to do well with reported revenue of $503 million for the 2020 financial year.
Not that dissapointing (Score:5, Insightful)
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If it goes too high or low, the IPO price was wrong.
We'll, you're almost right here.
The stock price can always hit dead on or higher and be "right", but if it's one cent lower than the expected/projected price, Greed has an uncontrollable shit-fit meltdown, and everything is wrong.
IPO price at 30 euros per share. Alas, SUSE's shares opened at 29.50 euros per share...
That, shouldn't have even warranted a story, much less been labeled disappointing. Greed was the one who insisted on that.
Chapter 4: Expectations. (Score:5, Funny)
* Projected price of $30/share *
* Stock goes public at $29.95 *
(Investors) "What the FUCK! This is a DISASTER! Liquidate all of my assets immediately."
- Stock Market Jokes, Volume VI
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Voting rights and ownership? I don’t recall being asked by Apple to vote on anything. In fact when I showed up at the office and told them I owned stock they had me removed by security!
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I don’t recall being asked by Apple to vote on anything.
Then you should check your mailbox more carefully.
I receive ballots and proxy forms from companies all the time.
If you own your Apple shares through a mutual fund, the fine print may give your fund the right to vote on your behalf.
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What are these stocks you speak of? Are they fiat currency? Can I spend them anywhere?
Ironically, you're asking this about a company that's been around for almost 30 years, who probably earned that IPO.
Unlike a lot of "valuable" multi-gazillion dollar IPO hype trains birthed from companies months old that will likely never turn a profit.
Why doesn't Europe use Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
For the life of me, I don't understand why European, Middle Eastern, Asian governments don't use Linux. I mean, If the EU would agree to use Linux, then you would see an explosion of software companies working to bring their services and products to Linux. I would personally be most interested in Civil Engineering software, which is basically Windows Only, and always have been. But imagine if India and Japan said "We are migrating away from Windows and you have to be compatible with us", then that would break one of the biggest strangle holds Windows has.
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For the life of me, I don't understand why European, Middle Eastern, Asian governments don't use Linux. I mean, If the EU would agree to use Linux, then you would see an explosion of software companies working to bring their services and products to Linux. I would personally be most interested in Civil Engineering software, which is basically Windows Only, and always have been. But imagine if India and Japan said "We are migrating away from Windows and you have to be compatible with us", then that would break one of the biggest strangle holds Windows has.
I don't know if [Desktop OS] will ever command that kind of stranglehold again.
Microsoft is slowly destroying that with more and more cloud offerings. The desktop requirement, is rapidly morphing into a dumb (browser) terminal. In other words, desktop OS variants between countries, is becoming irrelevant.
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It's becoming irrelevant in some fields. The OS you use is almost completely irrelevant for home use. But some industries, like Civil Engineering for example, are still very much heavily reliant on traditional desktop style software. That means you are using Windows.
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In Texas everyone has to use Microstation. By contract. If you do design for any State department, you are required by contract to submit all files as Microstation files -which means you have to use Microstation because there is just no other suite that exports to DGN well.
Interestingly, and a lot of people -even Texas Civil Engineers- don't realize this but their original DGN files are subject to open records. If you wanted to, you could request all of the CAD files for I-35. (You would piss off everyone w
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If you wanted to, you could request all of the CAD files for I-35. (You would piss off everyone when you did -including the AG- but you could.)
So...your book, Trolling for Shits and Giggles...when is the release date again?
I'd like to request a signed copy.
If you want a big organization making decisisons (Score:2)
Re:Why doesn't Europe use Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Well the CADT model is alive and well in Linux. People who write and use civil engineering software could give two shits about the latest gnome rework to use web technologies, or the latest rework of the sound or init system, much less the wonderful perf improvements of btrfs that come with complex and arbitrary rules about actually persisting the data to disk in case of power failure. Those people want to wake up in the morning hit space and have their computer resume to the exact same engineering diagrams they have been waking up to for the past decade.
MS built their desktop/workstation market on three decades of absolute backward compatibility and slow and slight changes to the OS and UI (that were almost always revertable with simple registry flags). Now that they have decided to remove one's ability to control the button bar, or whatever random UI bullshit every two weeks, maybe there isn't a difference but as long as they continue to support applications written for win32 25 years ago, those companies have little interest in porting to linux with their engineering time, rather than bolting on application specific features.
RH and to a lesser extent Suse exist to create a bridge between the CADT model and one that is boring where your server just keeps chugging along running SAP or whatever day in an day out. But the OS surface for server applications is like 1/100th that of a desktop application.
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16bit applications started in 1981, and which Microsoft has supported right until May 2020 through it's 32bit editions of Windows (you know, the 32bit version it kept precisely for backwards compatibility like the OP said) That's just shy of 40 years, or 4 decades.
Even if you want to limit yourself to 32bit only, that support has been ongoing for 26 years now and continues to this day in MS's 64bit offerings.
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it's, its, I have a spell chequer.
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Full and absolute backwards compatibility has been running for 26 years, by rounding error 3 decades.
And backwards compatibility with full up to date support from the vendor to modern standards (nearly all software has 32bit variants available, and windows 10 32bit supported everything that the 64bit edition did within the limits of the architecture) has been in place for 40 years.
There's really no arguing your way out of this regardless how much you try to redefine the terms the OP used. Microsoft is fucki
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Your right, but 32-bit support in windows was released in 1993 after a long beta for both NT and win32s, which at the time of this posting is nearly 28 years ago. I'm guessing your counting from win95 which wasn't the first 32-bit windows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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or the latest rework of the sound or init system, much less the wonderful perf improvements of btrfs that come with complex and arbitrary rules about actually persisting the data to disk in case of power failure. Those people want to wake up in the morning hit space and have their computer resume to the exact same engineering diagrams they have been waking up to for the past decade.
Wait, they couldn't care less about services at the core of their OS, but expect the computer to resume? I would argue you're missing the point. It's precisely things like a reworked init system which is able to track states of applications and the state of the system which enable the ability to have your PC sanely wake from sleep without having to boot fresh.
I'm an engineer. I expect my computer to work. In that regard I also expect my business machine which I do work on to... mid conference call dynamical
Re:Why doesn't Europe use Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
For the life of me, I don't understand why European, Middle Eastern, Asian governments don't use Linux.
Oh, in Germany, the city of Munich tried to switch to Linux, but later went back to Windows. For a starter, you can read about it on Wikipedia:
LiMux [wikipedia.org]
If you google on LiMux, and dig a little deeper . . . you will ask yourself if the decision to go back to Windows was technical . . . or political.
But it's crystal clear that Microsoft didn't like the Linux migration one bit, and did not want for others to see that this was a success. They didn't want other cities in Germany doing this, as well.
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Because Microsoft Office. I've once even worked at a very liberal food co-op that was cooperatively managed, and politics didn't matter: People want Word and Excel.
Re: Why doesn't Europe use Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Because using Linux is too expensive
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For the life of me, I don't understand why European, Middle Eastern, Asian governments don't use Linux. I mean, If the EU would agree to use Linux, then you would see an explosion of software companies working to bring their services and products to Linux. I would personally be most interested in Civil Engineering software, which is basically Windows Only, and always have been. But imagine if India and Japan said "We are migrating away from Windows and you have to be compatible with us", then that would break one of the biggest strangle holds Windows has.
Because of - how do you say corruption in English, ah yes - "lobbying".
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Inertia and cost to migrate.
a) You've got the MS Office lock in, which keeps a large percentage of the workforce that does spreadsheets, documents in office. .NET (and possibly with more of that office integration for good measure). Moving off that requires a new bid for development, etc.
b) The proprietary software lock in - this is business process software probably built end to end on
But it's not like they would migrate from Windows to Linux. The moves would be Windows to Web, where there's something in
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a) You've got the MS Office lock in, which keeps a large percentage of the workforce that does spreadsheets, documents in office.
For everything except Excel, LibreOffice does a better job opening old documents.
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They do, to the extent much of the world uses Linux. Mostly on headless systems, but it's common.
SUSE's problem is that even in Europe, more and more paying linux places have settled on RedHat. SuSE generally has three strategies currently:
-Existing SuSE shop that has really really baked in expectations around suse's specific tools (suse manager, yast, etc) that has not quite yet bothered to migrate away yet
-A place that runs SAP (SUSE and SAP have a strong interaction and SUSE accommodates them more than a
Is there really a niche for SUSE? (Score:2)
SUSE's former niche was the ability to create custom Live installs with a minimum of fuss using OBS, but the last time I checked the site it had "blossomed" from simple dropdowns and tickboxes into some godawful Win10-looking shitshow where actually selecting the packages you wanted was obfuscated by endless layers of Githubs and patronizing textbox horseshit about expanding new opportunities to leverage for personal wellness. I don't want to download and run your stupid fucking "software appliance", I want
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As a long-time Gentoo guy at home, I'm happy to admin SUSE boxes at work (well, OpenSUSE, but close enough). I'm primarily a software guy, so I really like yast - it means I don't have to remember which Red Hat or Ubuntu decided to do their config files for this particular version. While it has its quirks, and it's not as popular as RHEL/CentOS or Ubuntu, it's definitely a solid enterprise distro. SUSE is also used for a large number of HPC systems (over 100 of the top 500 clusters worldwide, might be a
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That was SUSE Studio, which was stopped, and was essentially a public service. It was not SUSE's niche market at all.
SUSE was and is big around SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (especially the SAP edition), management (SUSE Manager) and now also containers since the acquisition of Rancher (RKE, K3s, Longhorn, etc).
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Suse studio was probably one of the nicest things in the Linux market, fully automated image/installer creations for custom appliances/applications. The problem of course isn't that they weren't great, it is that they likely had a hard time monetizing it so it stagnated due to lack of investment. That describes a large part of the Linux ecosystem. 80% projects where someone spend a few months hammering away at something, didn't make any money but it fills a niche so it zombies around in a half-ass shape ful
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The value proposition of SUSE is an traditional Enterprise Linux in a bunch of different flavors (Enterprise Server, Desktop, Micro) and support for SAP HANA. Then add a one-stop management platform that allows management of most flavors of Linux (guaranteed patches for CentOS8 or Rocky for the next 10 years) with config management, image build, and the kitchen sink. OpenSUSE now also has the relation that CentOS used to have of being easy to live upgrade in the supported Enterprise version
But then they bet
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that's the desktop distro which isn't what SuSE is pushing, SLES is the big thing. I admin a bunch of those at work, I like more than RHEL anyway though I prefer Debian and derived distro servers.
That's not how any of this works (Score:5, Informative)
Selling a stock for 10$ and then watching it shoot up immideately to 50$ on IPO means the seller was a retard who wanted to leave 40$ per share on the table. If this happening was the definition of "success", then it'd only be succeess for the leeches who got into the IPO via sleazy banker deals immideately before it happening. For the company doing the share issue, it's a disaster.
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They won't sell everything right at the opening. They probably want the momentum that comes with a quickly rising stock. When people jump on the bandwagon they can sell slightly higher than where it eventually stabilizes.
SuSE had an IPO? (Score:2)
This is actually news to me. I was once a fan. I had hopes for them when Novell bought them. Then someone gobbled up Novell and now I don't know where anyone is.
Was SuSE spun off? Does SuSE still use the same capitalization?
So many questions.
Disappoints? (Score:5, Insightful)
Disappoints who? a bunch of meme stock gamblers who thought they were going to flip the share for 20% gains after holding them for a few hours?
Honestly it sounds like this was a nice orderly offering where they came pretty close accurately judging the fair market value for the company, so the existing owners got their due, but it still went up a little bit so long haul employees who probably had options to exercise before the IPO still enjoy a little immediate appreciation and the optics are mostly good.
Doing an IPO where your share price goes up initially but just slightly - should be considered winning at the IPO game.
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Disappoints who? a bunch of meme stock gamblers who thought they were going to flip the share for 20% gains after holding them for a few hours?
Oh, I think you made a typo. You meant to say "bankers who underwrote the IPO".
I'm with you all. If the purpose of an IPO is to raise capital for the company, SuSE was a brilliant success. If the point is create market buzz, meh. If the point was to make a quick buck for underwriters, it was a flaming disaster.
I'm unclear how this affects company employees, that is, the founders. I believe they get pre-public shares. What's the cost basis for those? That basis will be taxed as ordinary income, at least in t
I won't mind (Score:3)