Many unhappy returns from SCO Group
The SCO Group released its earnings for the quarter that ended Oct. 31, 2006. To no surprise, they’re worse than ever, as CEO Darl McBride (pictured) continues to drive the company into the ground.
Some highlights:
* Revenue for their fiscal 4th quarter dropped to $7,349,000, vs. $8,528,000 for the same quarter last year.
* Net loss for the quarter increased to $3,743,000; in the same quarter last year, it was $3,431,000.
* Revenue for the fiscal year dropped to $29,239,000, down from $36,004,000.
* Net loss for the fiscal year surged to $16,598,000, a huge increase from the previous year’s $10,726,000.
Now, you might think that this was due to the brain-dead IBM/Novell lawsuit. You’d be wrong. According to the financials, the costs of the lawsuit were only $2,220,000 for the fourth quarter, down from $3,380,000 for the same quarter in the previous year. That’s right — the losses from bad operations swamp the losses from bad lawsuits. Even without the lawsuit, they’d still be hemorrhaging money.
Is there hope that the company’s fortunes will improve? Not if McBride’s comment is any indication. “We remain committed to our UNIX business, introducing new mobile services to the marketplace and defending our intellectual property through the legal system,” he wrote.
How much longer will SCO survive? The best guess: Not long.
PS: Did you know that Darl McBride has his own Web site? It hasn’t been updated for a while, though.
On one level, It’s sad to watch SCO suffering a ‘death-by-a-thousand-cuts’ at the hands of IBM corporate lawyers and the American legal system. Less than 10 years ago they were a great technology company with a good operating system and some really neat features, like ‘personalities’ for running binaries compiled for different systems. Now they’re all but history and, as Alan says, there’s no sign they’re going to change course. I feel sorry for their skilled technical staff!