SiliconBeat

In a quiet, ignoble manner, the final chapter of the dot-com bubble came to a close this week. What, you didn’t hear the book closing? Join the club. I almost missed it myself.

On Tuesday, the central legal case that sought to assign blame for that era’s excess fizzled to an end. A handful of large banks put their second-most recent scandal behind them when they agreed to settle claims of rigging the IPO market for $586 million. They’re still trying to put last year’s little financial hiccup behind them.

That nine-figure sum only sounds like a lot of money because you probably work for a living. (That is, if you’re among the fortune 90 percent in Silicon Valley.) In fact, the legal firm that brought the class action suit against 309 start-ups and 55 underwriters at one point were asking for $12.5 billion.

The settlement provides a muddled, un-satisfying conclusion to an era. We wanted clarity. We wanted answers. We wanted someone to blame. Instead, we have fog. And the people we wanted to tar as the bad guys, turns out they were just scapegoats. Maybe. Or maybe not. Either way, take hear that the unfairly accused seem to have bounced back. Read the rest of this entry »

Bookham, the San Jose maker of optical components, said in a filing today it has settled litigation it had set in motion last year when it asked a federal court in San Jose and the International Trade Commission to declare invalid three patents held by JDS Uniphase related to tunable laser products.

As a result of the settlement, Bookham will pay Read the rest of this entry »

It appears that the job of leading JDS Uniphase is slightly less valuable on a cash basis these days. The new chief executive as of Jan. 1, Thomas Waechter, will be paid $700,000 a year in salary, $100,000 less than the current CEO, Kevin Kennedy, according to a regulatory filing Thursday. Waechter, who joined the company a year ago in October, is currently an executive vice president in charge of JDS’s communications test & measurement group.

Kennedy, who told the company in October he would be resigning, isn’t going far. Like so many executives, he’ll be retained as a consultant for awhile, and he’ll continue Read the rest of this entry »

When Kevin Kennedy joined JDS Uniphase in September 2003, the company was a train wreck. It had fired thousands of employees. It had taken massive write offs stemming from a series of overpriced acquisitions. It was, in short, the poster child for the telecom disaster.

With the news this week that Kennedy is stepping down as CEO, it’s hard to know how to grade his work, or the state of JDSU.

On the plus side, JDSU took a daring stand to fight a class action shareholder lawsuit and won a rare court trial. Losing likely would have crippled, if not killed the company. Fighting it was daring, but smart in the end.

And the company’s revenues have slowly grown since Kennedy took the helm:

2003: $675.9 million.
2004: $635.9 million
2005: $712.2 million.
2006: $1.2 billion.
2007: $1.3968 billion
2008: $1.53 billion.

On the downside, the company has still not posted an annual profit under Kennedy, though the losses have shrunk. I’m guessing the credit crisis and economic implosion is not going to help with things there . And the stock price has never recovered. Even with a reverse split along the way, the trajectory over the past five years is down:

So, it’s a mixed bag, at best. The company is still alive. And has a hefty chunk of change in the bank, so it will likely be around for awhile. But even if it can continue to keep the lights on, it’s harder to know whether it’s a company that will ever really matter again.

Less than two years after a policy was approved to reimburse him for the use of his private aircraft on business trips, JDS Uniphase Chief Executive Kevin Kennedy sold his plane, according to the company’s proxy issued in advance of its Nov. 12 annual meeting.

The audit committee of the company’s board of directors approved the policy in June 2006. The policy limited the reimbursement to $2,100 per flight hour plus a 12.5% fuel surcharge rate. The policy limited the amount of reimbursement to $800,000 per year. The rates were established “following review of fair market rates applicable to the rental and use of similar aircraft.”

We could find no Read the rest of this entry »

JDS Uniphase boosted the size of its board from nine to ten and named Penelope Herscher to the extra seat, according to an SEC filing today. Herscher (pictured) is chief executive of FirstRain, a search-driven research firm. Prior to that, she was chief marketing officer at Cadence Design Systems, which she joined after it acquired Simplex Solutions, where she was chief executive from 1996 to 2002. She also serves on the board of Rambus.

To welcome her to the board, Herscher gets restricted stock units that were valued at Read the rest of this entry »