Brilliant management
Swiss International Air Lines is not doing well and is asking for help from the Swiss government, again. Fortunately, the procedure has been standardised last time it happened. It involves:
- Firing the current directors, giving them an indecent amount of money in compensation;
- Hiring a new board of directors, paying them an indecent amount of money each year;
- Renaming the company, by truncating its former name;
- Offering it an indecent amount of money to get it started.
Granted, this is nothing new. It was known in 2001, when Swissair was renamed Swiss, that it would happen again. What’s new however is a rumour concerning the composition of the new board of directors.
A major player in this year’s economical events is foreseen to bring Sw back to the top: Darl McBride, President and Chief Executive Officer of the SCO Group. In case the name rings a bell, the SCO Group is ill-known for a recent succession of hallucinated claims about the ownership of part of the Linux code, as well as a lawsuit against IBM accusing them of bringing stolen Unix code to Linux. In case it doesn’t ring any bell, don’t bother; someone has enough bells ringing in his cranium already, in spite of anything else. McBride is also believed to be the founder and president of the American Society for the Safekeeping of Harmful Organisations and Ludicrous Executives.
His strategy for Sw is expected to follow the same plan of action that brought SCO to its apogee this summer, including:
- Claiming ownership of the airplane trademark;1
- Suing Boeing for stealing planes from Sw and selling them to Lufthansa;2
- Accusing other airlines of stealing secret memos from Sw, without which they would have never thought of making people pay to travel long distances by plane;3
- Enjoining Lufthansa passengers to pay a license fee of $5000 per hour of flight in an airplane, because it was stolen from Sw;4
- Accusing physics teachers of disclosing Sw trade secrets, like Bernoulli’s principle;5
- Removing one olive to the salads served for lunch in business class. Wait, I forgot, this has already been done.
With this plan, no doubt that Sw will be back in no time, ready for two more years of catastrophic management before asking for more money from the government.
1. SCO claimed ownership of the Unix trademark, which is actually owned by The Open Group. ↩
2. SCO accused IBM of stealing code from Unix System V and including it in Linux. ↩
3. SCO insulted the whole Open Source community by pretending that Linux could never have gotten the necessary quality for use by enterprise customers without access to the Unix code.
They forgot two small things: first, before Caldera became SCO, it provided the Linux community with hardware to develop the symmetric multiprocessing aspects of Linux. Second, none of SCO’s product include the set of features commonly admitted as necessary for use by enterprise customers and that IBM is supposed to have taken to put into Linux. ↩
4. SCO enjoined corporate Linux customers to pay a license fee of $699 per CPU to cease ‘misusing SCO’s Intellectual Property.’ ↩
5. SCO calls trade secrets topics that have been teached in operating system courses for decades and wonders that they have been disclosed. ↩