Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
But a number of decisions that cannot exactly be characterised as brilliant have ensured that Mandriva would stay in the red. And, of course, once a company in the red encounters financial conditions like those prevailing today, it's all downhill.
In 2005, Mandriva tried to expand its offerings to the business sector by releasing corporate server and corporate desktop versions. The reasoning seemed to be that an entity which could not manage its own offerings needed to create more offerings to be successful.
The possibility that the existing offerings were not being managed properly, apparently, did not strike anyone.
The same year, Mandriva decided to try its luck in the US market. In other words, a company that could not succeed in its own backyard was trying to compete with the biggest Linux company of them all, Red Hat, in a market that it did not understand.
Mandriva then decided to buy Conectiva, a Linux distribution based in Brazil. Why it did so, is a mystery.
And in 2006, the company threw out its founder Gael Duval. The man who had created the distribution in 1998 was thrown out with the company's financial status cited as a reason for his redundancy and that of a few others.
One thing that many Linux companies never realise is that, unlike Microsoft, they are first and foremost technology companies and only second are they marketing companies. That is because Linux sells on its technical merits, not because of fluff on the surface.
Hence, when the top techie types are the first to be thrown out during a time of economic bad news, users get the message - the company in question has decided to follow the dictum that marketing is more important than technology.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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