March 23, 2007
Great news for Openwave
Dave Peterschmidt is out as CEO of Openwave, and this is a very good thing. Even better, the company is being shopped. Best news: Jerry Held is on the committee doing the shopping. Not that I agree with Jerry on everything, but on the whole he’s pretty astute.
Openwave will probably find a buyer at a decent price. Dave’s bad, but he doesn’t completely destroy companies; there should still be some value there.
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2 Responses to “Great news for Openwave”
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It is good news. DP has been an absolute disaster. He lost all the top execs
he inherited and brought in a bunch of clowns who know nothing about the
company, industry or technology. He’s reorg’d numerous times in failed attempts
to correct his fundamental problem — he didn’t listen to customers or to his
internal product/industry experts. Many of his reorganizations were simply
reversals of previous reorgs — that is, there was no long-term direction, just
random reshuffling of the deck chairs.
But worst was that he totally shut off funding to the existing product base,
allowing it to languish with only bare maintenance and the development of new
features that were paid for by customers, while shifting funds to a small
set of new products that his expensive outside management consultants dreamed
up. Unfortunately, none of these products has any real interest from the
customer base. Yes, the industry press might get excited at the slideware, and
yes, Opwv has managed to talk a few customers into taking on a new product
trial at a virtually give away price. But it’s all vapor and fumes.
Now that the natural revenue stream from the big products — MAG and MxMail —
has wound down from the last product upgrades DP’s predecessor oversaw, the
future revenue stream is looking smaller and smaller. The biggest deal this
year is from Sprint, and is due to their data center consolidation — it
has nothing to do with new Opwv product.
DP has been a total disaster.
what companies would be interested to buy OPWV?