Personally, I think MicroFocus was already ruined financially before the acquisition, while OpenText has suffered taking on massive debt and legacy baggage that has stalled any momentum we had previously with Cloud and Cybersecurity.
26 replies (most recent on top)
Shannon is clueless, Paul can save us.
@175 agreed. I can’t believe we are cutting spend on external, industry-standard vendors (e.g., Salesforce, Slack, Zoom, Jira) and forcing us to migrate to our own cr-ppy portfolio products. These are "franken-stacks" of acquired code and savings on license fees are arguably being wiped out by the massive cost of lost productivity and the time spent trying to make these tools work. We are getting SMAXed in the face.
@h9 Yeah, when a company this large starts forcing the use of freeware (or low cost ware) and imposing its own solutions (that don't work) but cost a LOT of time and money to develop and implement, well, that's a sign of hard times to come.
@x3 Mark B ruined both.
Two sides of the same coin.
Both companies were software goes to die. Both had terrible CEOs.
@m3 with 'core' being anything that can't be sold
@m3 “They would say that, wouldn’t they?”
Only some parts are being sold, the core business is not
We are watching the unwinding of a conglomerate. Expect SMB Cybersecurity (Carbonite/Webroot) to be the next salvage part sold before June (if we can find a buyer).
Do not let anyone gaslight you into thinking this is a Transformation. It is a Liquidation.
@cp
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Open Text envisioned itself as M&A 'ballers' when they knew very little about the product suite or (if run correctly) MF's value. This also applies to most of the acquisitions they did. I have never seen more arrogance in my professional career.
They made M&A rookie mistakes immediately on Legal Day 1, set upon firing those with the most institutional knowledge and any Leader who was left got an OT Leader 'who already knew everything'🙄
When those who remained would try to provide guidance it was 'off we their heads' and 'we know what we are doing'
They didn't know sh*t about what they were doing particularly with their integration strategy.
This is indeed a sh*t show they created..the outcome was completely expected.
Whether current employees wish to believe it or not, the company is now in the process of being completely broken up and sold for salvage parts.
Your investors are right to be furious.
The absolute worst run company in my over 40 years in Tech.
Some companies shoot themselves in the foot. OTEX gets giant cannons and says "hold my beer" before aiming at its own feet. (I guess they figure they can get new feet from high school students in India.) Truly astounding that OTEX limped through so many years of this gross incompetence.
Micro Focus’ biggest mistake was overreaching in acquisitions. They tried to run and integrate companies that were much larger than themselves using their familiar operating model, but the sheer scale of what they swallowed left them unprepared when the market declined. To be fair, Micro Focus’ main flaw was inaction, yet they rarely made decisions that directly harmed the products.
OpenText is the opposite. It acts aggressively, but often in ways that damage both the products and engineering teams. For example, forcing a move from GitHub to GitLab, repeatedly switching internal tools, and migrating from SharePoint to its own products. We spent almost an entire year just on tool and system transitions. Internally, we joke that if someone wanted to deliberately destroy an engineering team’s productivity, it would be hard to invent so many methods, yet OpenText seems remarkably good at it.
If those decisions were already hard to justify, the most destructive move was eliminating the core teams — the engineers with more than a decade of experience on the core products — and shifting the work to so-called “Centers of Excellence.” This had a nuclear-level impact: it broke the continuity of product knowledge and severely damaged the engineering capability built up over many years.
OpenText was already on a risky path, but in the end it was not the market that brought it down. It was a series of self-inflicted decisions. In many ways, this was less a failure caused by external forces and more the result of destructive internal management choices.
@gm Most of the MF solutions have been gutted or starved or handed over to clueless OT yes men.
You can’t systematically trash something for a couple of years and then hope it gets better because you’ve left it alone for a few months.
The damage is now irreversible.
MF was a dumpster fire, but MB and OTEX is something far worse. Unfortunately, MB was just a symptom of a dysfunctional board of directors. That is why nothing has really changed. OTEX will continue the current course until it has either divested or ki-led all products. OTEX is incapable of innovation or investment.
MF had the smarts not to ki-l successful products with cheap COE labour, and the executive team was not nearly as dysfunctional and nasty as OTEX. MF bit off more than it could chew (debt) and OTEX/MB was stupid enough to buy it all along with the debt with a strategy that destroyed valuable products with cheap labour and proudly dysfunctional management.
MF also did not blather endlessly about culture, and largely left acquisitions alone culturally. This was probably smart, as the success of some products was in part due to their culture. OTEX was proud of a profoundly dysfunctional culture, and imposed it blindly.
OTEX only has one trick, and it does not work for products that require investment.
Did the grifters ruin the grifters? Neither of these companies have been run well. And look, we all know what MB was and did, but he's been gone a while and things aren't exactly looking up. Could it be that all of the "leadership" is basically exactly the same there, minus some very cynical virtue-signaling, to be fair. It'll be fits and starts, but the grave has long been dug.
OpenText ruined OpenText
MF certainly wasn't thriving at the time of acquisition, but OT was on a whole other level of sheer leadership incompetence.
Everything revolved around MB's personal mood, nobody below him was empowered to make any decisions. He held on for far too long and did a lot of damage both to MF and OT.
@dt Maybe the MF employees demeanour was caused by the realisation that OT was run purely on the basis of one man’s mood swings.
Happens when a minnow swallows a whale.
MicroFocus is not the problem, rather it was the solution to save a failing company. OpenText management is the problem. Full on incompetent leaders.
I loved working at OpenText until the MF acquisition. All the MF employees were angry and entitled making it a hostile environment. That why I left.
MF is a good acronym.
@cp incompetence of OT management cannot be overstated. Many of us have lived through mergers and/or worked at other tech companies. MB and crew were hands down the most incompetent and creepy team we ever experienced.
Mark ruined OT. The MF buy was just the ki-ling blow.
OpenText clearly lacked understanding of the MF product suite, and acquiring something they had no real expertise in was a major misstep. Overall experience with the company has been extremely disappointing. The management culture feels unprofessional and lethargic, with leaders who appear disengaged and more focused on collecting paychecks than actually driving progress. I’ve never encountered a company as poorly run as this one, total sh-tshow.
HPE merger severely wounded MF, and OT management is incompetent.
100% Microfocus ruined OpenText. It was in significantly worse shape than anyone realised