To be fair, SUSE before Novell was in a worse state. If I’m not mistaken they were close to missing payroll and has tried to shop themselves to Sun before Novell agreed to buy them.

Evil IBM(TM) threw in $50m to help the deal along and preserve SuSE for its hardware.

Also, it didn’t help that SUSE folks and Ximian folks were like oil and water. Novell tried a combo that made sense on paper but there was culture clash.

This^^^

I actually think this has the same potential of a “good” PE move as the Dell success.