Lineo near Death

An anonymous reader notd a bit running on LinuxGram about Lineo about ready to croak. It paints a pretty bleak view of the Linux embedded system company. Oddly enough, I'm still not exactly sure what they were trying to do.

What they were doing

[fruey]

Oddly enough, I'm still not exactly sure what they were trying to do.

Well, if you read the article right at the end, they made / participated in the Embedded Linux for Sharp PDAs.

Of course, bad management is what causes bankruptcies like this. 70 staff and only Sharp on the books, with royalties coming in a year later?

I bet they were all screwing around with cool Linux kernel stuff and forgetting to sell it to anyone as a practical application. Hehe.

Thought they were all gone by now

[moankey]

Didnt know there were still companies around that dont have a clear plan a lots of money to throw around. I thought 2001 was the year that all bad and some good companies went down for the count.

Nothing too surprising or new to read here, just another technology company that was riding the tech boom and investor ignorance.

BEOS will be their first choice...

[Ominous Armed Cow]

1) Palm bought all of BE's assets, including the BEOS, which spawned an offshoot that Be was trying to retarget at the embedded market.

2) Palm is moving to the StrongARM platform for high end units (i.e. corporate apps). I have a Zaurus SL5000D (206Mhz, 32MB of Ram, 16MB Rom) which is a good example of what this architecture can do with a more functional operating system like Wince 2002.

3) Beos was an incredibly fast OS which ran in a very small footprint, so my guess is Palm will introduce it as PalmOS 6 or 7. When that happens, I'll go buy the Clie clamshell version of it.

Re:Simple Explanation

[cornice]

Poor management? Of course it is but let's look at the pressure to do this.

For example, a close friend of mine was working for a company working on PKI stuff. They had hundreds of millions in funding from a prominent international investment bank. They were told repeatedly that they were not spending fast enough! There were some suggestions that subsequent rounds of funding hinged upon meeting a specific burn rate. Obviously this all changed very quickly and all funding dried up and so did the company.

So who is to blame? Yes management is ultimately responsible and no excuse is going to bring the company back but it should be noted that the decisions that were made were not as irrational as they seemed.

Re:This is just flat out *wrong*

[penguin_nipple]

Cripes. People have bills to pay and families to feed. Doesn't anyone have a shred of decency anymore?

From my experience I can give a resounding 'no' to that. There is no decency unfortunatley. I was a research devloper at a Canadian University [www.wlu.ca] in the dept. of physics and computing. Our research group is/was a "Center for Excellence" and we developed two fully functional laser simulators of the Quantum Well and VCSEL variety. Things were progressing for 2 years, and the projects both reached decent beta stage.

Our entire research group was summarily laid of on a lovely friday afternoon at 5:30. No warning, no heads-up, no consideration.

Personally I was insulted but I can tell you, I am not the first, nor the last that this has happened to...

Mind you the educational institution referred to here had no problem highlighting our research group and some of my other research projects in glossy fliers in order to attract attention to new students and the general populace.

Oh the irony of being highlighted in promo material by the marketroids and concurrently bitchslapped by the accounting dept. in one fell swoop.

when will they ever learn?

[Michael_Jarvis]

As a former employee of Merinta [linuxdevices.com] (an embedded Linux company that went under in May 2001), I am very sympathetic to the Lineo employees. I guess I was fortunate--at least Merinta never bounced a paycheck, and our CEO (Camillo Martino) gave us a heads-up before we actually ran out of money.

Linux shows so much promise in the embedded market, but it will never get there until companies wise up and start using sound business practices. I am so sick and tired of seeing companies with great ideas and talented people fail because they have incompetent management with poor spending practices.

Having millions of dollars in venture capital funding does not mean your company is "successful" or "wealthy". It means you have been trusted with money to make your idea work. Don't go out and blow the money on Aeron chairs, fancy offices and glitzy parties. Spend it wisely, and use it to get your product out the door. When your company is generating REAL revenue and profit, THEN you can consider celebrating.

Blowing venture capital on stupid things is about the same as maxing out a personal credit card on luxury items in my book. It's just plain stupid.

I feel so passionately about this issue because I've seen so many companies go under, where the workers suffer because of poor management. Enron is a really big example, but there are hundreds if not thousands of "dot-coms" that did the same thing to their workers.

I hope TUXIA [tuxia.com] is still doing well, and I hope they learn from the mistakes of others in the marketplace.