Mark was a good person, but he's no Steve Jobs.
Now the investors will sell off few things Citrix bought that worked (Goto and netscaler) and the divisions that don't get sold need to pray that XA/XD will have some sort of turnaround as a cloud product.
Citrix stock soars on news that its 21-year CEO is finally, really going to retire — and an activist investor is in!
Watch out for the changes ahead ... more spin off companies, more selling off assets and more employee layoffs!
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/citrix-stock-soars-on-ceo-retirement-news-2015-7#ixzz3hQe7LudJ
Mark should have never come back, a series of really poor acquisitions should have been scrutinized before forking over cash for poor technology at best. All the folks who worked in the acquisitions quickly left the company long ago as they knew they purchased failed ideas, I mean really Podio? ByteMobile? %Insert any third or fourth tier service provider here% They didn't buy the best, only what they thought would fit the future vision...but even the employees couldn't figure it out. None of us ever had a clue (nor does 90% of the workforce) how any of the products work or even function together. They never bothered to train any of us....somehow we would just figure out that if the Citrix logo was on something, it had to be golden. The biggest disappointment was the "Backstage" internal intranet which was just a political grab for power by Marketing (again SR management involved in this project left to "spend more time with family")....millions of dollars sunk down a black hole. Agreed...those who are waiting around for a severance from the shills who just took over, you can count your days as they are now numbered and you will be lucky to get a coffee mug from one of the 60 thousand dollar coffee machines in the break room.
the Feb 2015 severance package will look like the lottery compared to what Elliot's going to offer in the future. Mark is feeling the Elliot love now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17lkdqoLt44&feature=youtu.be
I'm in agreement, I think Mark stayed too long, and we were too timid about moving into a new areas. (We bought ShareFile instead of dropbox or box.net, we bought Podio instead of BaseCamp, or the real blunder we bought Xen instead of VMWare).
I always worried that Henshall would get the company after Mark and hated the idea of working for a company run by a spreadsheet. I think Elliot will be worse than Henshall, and if you don't get spun off, and you are not directly tied to XA/XD, you need to worry.
I got laid off in Feb 2015 layoff and happy that I'm not having to live through what is going on.
True Marks time has come and gone but look at Elliot Management's track record with other companies and what they did to Compushare, have tried to do with Argentina, with Samsung, etc.. They are following the same rule book as they have always done. Sell off parts of the company, get rid of employees (cost reduction), and anything else that will let them at the end of the day make a killing on their stocks and leave a gutted shell shock husk of company left afterwards. Hey as long as they get their 20% return they don't care.
They are not about building a sustainable company that has decent growth and will perform for years to come. They are about getting their pound of flesh at any cost.