It seemed that every news outlet I went to early last week was jumping all over a story in Monday's edition of London's Financial Times that was based on an interview with Ellison. "Oracle Chief Opens Door to Buying Novell," trumpeted the headline of a Boston Globe article that cited the Financial Times story. "Oracle Looks at Buying Novell," a Slashdot headline proclaimed. "Oracle Contemplates Acquiring Novell," Softpedia echoed.
Having interviewed Ellison myself several times over the years, I didn't find it a bit surprising that he would say something like that just to bask in the buzz it would create. But then I read the original Financial Times article, and I realized it wasn't Ellison being Ellison after all. It was we in the media who were the jerks.
Buried way down in the 1,410-word story was a reference to Oracle's widely reported interest in buying JBoss, which was recently acquired by Red Hat. Ellison noted that there would have been a risk in Oracle acquiring JBoss or Red Hat because of the inherent lack of control that open-source companies have over their intellectual property. In that context, the Financial Times author wrote, "Oracle looked at buying Novell, owner of SUSE, Europe's biggest Linux company, but would have faced the same risk, [Ellison] adds."
That's it. That's what all the fuss was about. A condensed version of the article by the same author made an equally innocuous reference to Novell: "As part of a recent study of the open-source software market, Mr. Ellison said that Oracle had considered buying Novell, which after Red Hat is the biggest distributor of Linux."
It's mind-boggling that those statements would come as a surprise to anyone. Companies like Oracle consider such acquisitions all the time. I would be absolutely shocked if anyone at Oracle, IBM, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, CA or even Microsoft could honestly and knowledgeably say that their company hadn't considered an acquisition of Novell.
Even more mind-boggling is how so many news outlets managed to extrapolate from those comments that Oracle is actively considering a Novell buyout. (Computerworld.com on Monday posted a Reuters story that made it clear it was in the past that Ellison had looked at acquiring Novell.) And once the buzz started, there was no stopping it. That turned out to be a very good thing for Novell, which saw its stock rise 2.3 percent on Monday.
The fact is, somebody needs to acquire Novell. As it stands, Novell is losing customers hand over fist to Microsoft. It's been largely unsuccessful in capitalizing on the brilliant NetWare-to-Linux migration strategy it adopted three years ago. And it remains wholly incapable of getting its perennially pathetic marketing act together.
Under the tired leadership of 65-year-old CEO Jack Messman, Novell doesn't appear to be doing much more than sitting around, waiting for the phone to ring. I used to wonder why Novell's board hasn't given Messman a gold watch and a handshake, until I realized that the average age of the 10 board members is 64.5. I guess 70-year-old board member James D. Robinson III sees Messman as downright dynamic.
At least Ellison, at 62, leads his company with vitality and exuberance. That sort of thing will eventually echo through the halls of Novell. But it'll be coming from the other end of the phone.