Thread regarding Riverbed Technology Inc. layoffs

Thoma does not care about customers, or about what posters here think. They are in this for money, and money they will make. Riverbed has strong cash flows, they will further improve this by laying people off and cutting expenses like there is no tomorrow. We can agree on the expense side, you can observe this as it's happening right now. Once cash flows are further improve they will use it to pay off loans they took to acquire Riverbed, they will take additional loans using Riverbed as a borrower to pay themselves for the portion that they covered during the purchase. At that point you have a situation where Thoma has no debt as it relates to the transaction, therefore they got Riverbed for free as it paid for itself via cash flow surplus and loans that Riverbed takes. It'll take two to three years to get there. Then they go for the jugular, and finalize the play: they divide the company and sell each piece to the highest bidder. All money collected during the sale is pure profit for Thoma. If you noticed here there is no reference to customers as they are not in business of growing business, they are in business of making money using a 2 to 3 year horizon. Employees are treated as an expense and all expenses are to be reduced up to the point where it starts to hurt. That's it, it's simple, that's your Private Equity (PE) play repeated in thousands of PE takeovers that took place over last few decades.