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Well, not necessarily... but considering what IBM has done to the states of Indiana, Texas and California, do you really want to trust Snake Oil Sam with the whole federal government?

There are other articles like this: http://localtechwire.com/business/local_tech_wire/news/blogpost/8228715/ floating around
Basically they say that Cisco is really looking at Smart Grid stuff, not Skype.

Anyone got a contact at any of the companies in question to actually confirm/deny/etc?

IBM would not last a month if it were prohibited from selling products or services in the United States.

A few minutes with Google suggests otherwise.

"At the beginning of 2009, 71% of IBM's nearly 400,000 employees are working overseas - a 65% increase from two years prior." http://seekingalpha.com/article/131421-ibm-s-broad-global-presence-should-boost-q1-earnings

"IBM cut U.S. workforce by 6,000 while adding 18,000 overseas in 2008" http://localtechwire.com/business/local_tech_wire/news/story/4783439/

"IBM is aggressively selling to small businesses and local governments around the world." http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2009/01/22/ibm-is-dead-long-live-ibm.aspx

"Not so gradually over the next five to 10 years, the 70/30 split between domestic and foreign investment could invert, resulting in an optimal placement of 70 percent of U.S. investment capital in international ventures."
http://www-03.ibm.com/industries/financialservices/us/detail/resource/B069979J37301Z69.html

Oracle has always been bullying Microsoft.

Larry Ellison want's to create the world's largest software company and dethrone MS. He's tried everything including support for nettops.

Considering MS gained dominance through an operating system and an office suite, what Ellison did with just a database is quite remarkable.

They have since grown their software portfolio to include enterprise applications, application servers and middleware.

Now with Sun, their getting an OS, a great development platform and a lot of other nice things in addition to the hardware business.

Oracle's revenue after the Sun acquisition should be close to Microsoft's and close to half of IBM and HP's.

Sun was only about a quarter of the size of IBM and HP, it's two biggest competitors and wasn't doing too bad considering who they were up against. And like I said, Oracle wasn't too shabby in the software world.

The combination of the two, if done properly, should really be fierce. Oracle has been buying a lot of companies in the past few years and all reports I've read in the press indicate that Oracle has been handling the mergers very well.

I thought Cisco would have been the ideal buyer for Sun and I didn't even consider Oracle. Now that the merger has been announced and I had time to think about it, I couldn't think of a much better buyer of Sun.

The two companies have so much in common. People that deploy Oracle tend to do it on Solaris/SPARC more than any other platform and that's been the case for a long time. So the companies have had a strong relationship over the years. Not always great, but overall pretty good. The big knock was when Ellison decided to switch developer workstations to Linux from Solaris, which may not have been a good idea since Solaris/SPARC deployments still beat linux deployments for Oracle.

Here you have two CEO's that hate MS, and want to dominate IBM. We're in for some interesting times.

While I don't hate Linux, the linux fanbois on here have been getting on my nerves so let me throw in this barb.

When IBM was rumored to be in talks with Sun, rumors were going around that Oracle was looking to buy RedHat.

When the opportunity to buy Sun, Oracle chose them over RedHat. RedHat wouls probably have cost them only $2bln compared to the $5.6bln it's going to cost to buy Sun. So suck it! :)

Investors Love Linux: Red Hat Stock Is Red Hot After Upbeat Earnings, Sales Report

Web Turns 10 - But Was Mosaic Really First and Best Browser? No, No.
By Paul Jones, Special To LTW
Editor's note: April 22, 1993, is widely regarded as the day on which a number of people, including Marc Andreessen, who went on to help found Netscape, produced Mosaic - the ground-breaking Web browser. But was it really the first? To mark the 10th anniversary, Local Tech Wire asked one of the pioneers in Internet development - Paul Jones - to talk about the rise of the browser and how the technology transformed the Internet. Jones, who is director of ibiblio.org, a project that includes the Site Formerly Known as MetaLab and SunSITE, The Public's Library, has some very interesting observations.

CHAPEL HILL - I don't mean to spoil the party, but the geek in me is forcing me to tell the cold unsociable truth - Mosaic, the browser that taught us the World Wide Web, is neither the first web browser nor is it the best. To make matters even more, well uncomfortable, I believe that Mosaic was a serious step in the wrong direction.

The web seems wild and wide open now, but yes it was once designed to be more so. Believe it or not - the Web was designed for connectivity for all users, not just for publishers or information providers and it allowed the person browsing to create pages and links quickly and easily. The first web browser was about sociability and the interchange of ideas, not just delivery of linked pages.

The real "Tucker" of Web browsers was the browser developed at CERN -where the web itself was developed - for the NeXT computer. The CERN
Browser allowed not only web page browsing, but also WYSIWYG page creation and the ability to create links by simply highlighting text on a browsed page and linking that text to a page under construction by an easy click.

The Hypermedia Browser also called Nexus and for a while called
WorldWideWeb was written by none other than Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 and released in Christmas of that year. The focus of Tim's Browser was collaboration and mutual linking as reflected by the ease with which pages could be produced and links made between pages.

I created my own first web page with only a few seconds instruction from Tim and a look at his demo age (a copy of which can be found at www.ibiblio.org/pjones/old.page.html ).

For Tim's own description of the first Browser as well as screen shots of the browser in action see www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html

More participation

Notice that the Web in Tim's vision, as seen in his browser, was to be about active participation and creation of shared linked pages.

Mosaic did have its moment of promoting collaboration. In Mosaic 1.2, the Group Annotations feature allowed readers of pages to add notes to those pages. This innovation was a precursor to the message boards, discussion groups and blogs of today. The nice thing about Group Annotations was the ease in which you could make notes for other group members. Even better Annotations in Mosaic supported both text and audio comments.

Although Annotations would eventually collapse due to their
over-popularity (and unscalable protocol design), the feature did manage to keep part of the dream of a sociable Web alive. But with the release of Mosaic 2.0 in September 1993, the folks at NCSA's System development Group decided to kill Group Annotations "initially" which turned out to be forever. (See
target="_blank">archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/So ftware /Mosaic/Docs/group-annotations.html for NCSA's description of Annotations and their brief tale of their depreciation.)

'A nice piece of work ...'

The Mosaic that finally appeared in September 1993 was a nice piece of work. Mostly