I wish us all the best of luck, and hope we find better jobs at companies whose survival we don’t have to question.
36 replies (most recent on top)
@2k4 we don’t need more products, just better more updated ones.
@2jp R&D is inherently wasteful. Accepting that as an operating cost and being innovative is how companies avoid and get out of this situation. OT only uses short-term, number must go up, stock price thinking and that means it will never happen.
If you're still at OT, just walk out the door. The promise of a severance is basically gone now that they're adopted the forever layoff method with PIPs and impossible performance metrics. There is literally no good reason to keep showing up at OT at all as an employee. Everyone just needs to get up and walk out and never look back.
@2jp I don’t think this is the case. We are already have a lot of products that we can’t afford to maintain and are therefore not as competitive.
@2cy we need to sell more products to get more developers, but we need more developers to make customers want to buy our products. Not sure how we get out of this cycle.
@2ct Yeah, you would need to stop laying off the developers for that to happen, though and see...um, number need to go up.
@2cs Our focus is wrong. We seem to be planning out products as though we are Facebook and have the bank account to support internal AI development. We can't own the AI, we don't have billions to spend on this. We should be building our products to integrate with our customer's chosen AI provider. Our products need to be extendable, customizable with an external LLM.
@2bx agreed. Customers want solutions to problems not visions. If we are the best or cheapest people will buy our products but if others are new, better or cheaper customers will not pick us. As for AI, we simply aren’t proven so other companies are a safer bet.
@2bx I've had some. Usually execs of customers on large deals. Part of convincing them you and your team are good to work with for a long time.
@24c I've dealt directly with customers for decades. I have never, EVER, had one tell me anything about my company's "vision."
You're full of sh-t.
My customers all just complain that they don’t understand our vision and don’t see a future staying with us. We need some good news soon!!!!
@1gn there will be no new CEO. All division will be sold off asap and the new CEO will be the CEO of the company that acquired the division. Eventually James will have no one reporting to him.
@1gn I am not on the search committee or know what experience they are looking for with the new CEO.
@1h1 yes, we need a book writing CEO again
@1gn we don’t need a tech CEO, just someone that can effectively sell off all the products lines to other companies or private equity. New CEO will not be doing any tech innovation.
@1gj could a CEO without deep tech experience gain the respect needed to move OT forward?
@1eh I heard Calvin McDonald is also on that list. He steps down from his current CEO position this month.
@1dn no I heard that former Slack executive Lidiane Jones is on the short list.
@1a9 is he moving to Canada?
@14w he leads with LOVE
@14j I have no comment regarding Duggan being a good CEO or not, but at least he can spell McDonald’s.
@d4 Duggan couldn't manage a MacDonald's franchise much less OpenText. Is this you Paul??
@jk regardless, We’re probably heading into the worst year yet.
HP-Software (during the split from Hpe) took only the Autonomy product when acquired by MFI.
Then MFI subsequently rebranded it and divested it (sold it off) to Smarsh prior to MFI being acquired by Open Text.
HPE had to retain all Legal and Shareholder liabilities from the original 'Autonomy' not MFI.
@em Oh my god... That's perfect.
@cw Spirit Halloween of Tech
@ej agreed, it’s like Kmart buying Sears but our Edward Lampert was let go in August and his cheerleading CMO was let go in December so after the Nashville bash there has been no bright spots. To you point MF acted like a real company and has some AI product. But with no investment in products since 2023 not seeing a future for MF or OT products.
@eg Ex MF here. While you are correct, and MF was openly described as the hospice of software, it did have a small benefit over OT. It was actually (somewhat poorly) run like an actual business. Not a glorified executive ego st-----g exercise.
Faint praise I know, but still worth mentioning.
@ea While Autonomy didn't file for Chapter 7, rather it’s now owned by OpenText, Its acquisition by HP is famous for nearly destroying HP. HP bought Autonomy for $11 billion, only to write down $8.8 billion of that value a year later due to "accounting improprieties." This is widely considered the worst acquisition in Silicon Valley history, leading to years of litigation that continued into 2025.
@OP anything MicroFocus touches dies. See what Autonomy Corporation did to HP and how MicroFocus was involved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomy_Corporation?wprov=sfti1# We were a better company in 2022. Wish we could go back in time.
@bg you mean back to before mf days !!
Duggan could save us but I think the board wants a Canadian CEO. All of us in the US should look elsewhere for work in 2026.
Waiting around for some big severance is likely not going to happen either for lifers and geese they won’t even accelerate vesting of RSUs so in the end we are SOL.
@bg By the end of '26, OT will have a for sale sign in the window after the board have left it sitting in the front of a discount supermarket parking lot.
Well the company will probably be 25% smaller and be down to 10,000 employees due to divestitures and layoffs
By the end of 26, openfext will be down to around 10k employees
I think Duggan can get us back on track