As I mentioned in a recent

post, I was excited when I saw that Novell had finally turned a profit for

the previous quarter. Sadly it looks like not everyone was happy about it.

Novell’s board of directors recently

decided to replace

both the CEO, Jack Messman, and the CFO of the company. Jack Messman took over

from Dr. Eric Schmidt, who took over the reigns at Google a few years ago.

Messman had his work cut out for him.

While trying to milk the last dime out of the NetWare cash cow, he had to

quickly get the SuSe Chameleon producing money by attempting to build a

services company out of a free operating system. Clearly, it was a huge

challenge. Now, Novell’s new CEO Ron Hovsepian has those duties.

Of course, Novell’s not alone in the

C-level Shuffle. Microsoft has gone through the


same thing, and has the 2-year Long Goodbye from Bill Gates to contend

with.  

When a company changes a CEO,

major changes occur shortly thereafter. Maybe Novell will place added emphasis

on Linux. Maybe it will put itself up for sale. I guess we’ll just have to wait

and see.