"Few companies have changed hands as often as Suse and yet remained strong players in their business."
"Strong players"? What quantitative evidence exists demonstrating that SuSE has any more than a marginal and insignificant share of server or desktop installs?
Its journalistic verbiage, what do you want them say? Ultimately its been bought for $2.5billion, if it were a startup it would be a unicorn, it seems to be moving forward, what more do you want.
There are probably many companies that have changed hands that many times also.
The market SuSE is in is not "server or desktop installs", it is "support contracts/subscriptions for server or desktop installs", and they have to have a non-negligible share of that market, given that Wikipedia claims they have 1400 employees, which is more than 10% of Red Hat's number.
Interestingly it claims 750 employees for SuSE in 2016; perhaps the business entity sold today includes some departments that were elsewhere in the org-chart in 2016?
"Strong players"? What quantitative evidence exists demonstrating that SuSE has any more than a marginal and insignificant share of server or desktop installs?