Slashdot Mirror
Oracle's Hostile Takeover Bid For PeopleSoft
rkuris writes "Oracle has launched a 5.1 billion dollar cash hostle takeover bid against Peoplesoft. PeopleSoft's CEO Craig Conway (a former top executive for Oracle) called Oracle's offer 'atrociously bad behavior from a company with a history of atrociously bad behavior.' 'Obviously it is a transparent attempt to disrupt the [1.7 billion dollar friendly] acquisition of J.D. Edwards by PeopleSoft announced earlier this week.' The week's events have reopened old wounds between the companies, which have a history of hostility and name calling."
I'm assuming you misspelled zealot, and I'm also assuming you're an idiot. Why would you sell it to Oracle (for $16/share) when you could sell it on the open market for more (almost $18/share right now)?
It seems obvious that this offer was designed to intimidate PeopleSoft, disrupt the JD Edwards acquisition, and cast doubt on the future of PeopleSoft's products so that customer's would be less likely to buy.
Wow, talk about a severe lack of perspective.
Oracle is using its cash on hand to cannibalize another company, steal its customer list, terminate development of its products, lay off 8000 tech workers, and turn Silicon Valley into even more of a smoking crater than they have already by outsourcing so much of their own development work to the Third World.
But they support Linux, so that's all OK! Oracle deserves our support!
Well, if you are talking about the community contributions, Oracle is heavily pushing clustering support for Linux. They are doing everything possible to make Linux clusters a perfect replacement of your big unix iron. The linux porting group in Oracle is growing way too fast and quite a lot of their work is on the kernel and libraries and is GPL'ed and contributed back to community either directly or in form of patches available on Oracle web. I'd say IBM is doing more to help Linux, but I am not sure about Sun. Really.
:)
Besides, Ellison hates Gates. Its personal. So his support of Linux is very Slashdot-like.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Oracle is trying to gain controlling interest in People Soft without the blessing of the board of directors of People Soft.
Proxies can be considered the voting rights of the stock.
Green mail is two things, primarly it would be People Soft bribing Oracle by buying back whatever shares Oracle accumulated -- giving Oracle a nice profit. Another form of Green Mail would be Oracle offering to buy huge blocks of stock off of People Soft stock holders at premium prices -- or simply gaining the proxy of them.
Poison Pills would be People Soft doing things to wreck the company and make it not so attractive as a takeover. Poison pills are usually a package of things they do. But the most adverse is to take out huge loans to buy back its own stock, Licensing company IP, and even awarding employees huge stock options. Basicaly they are throwing road blocks up and salting the earth.
White Knights are 3rd party corporations that come in and start buying People Soft and forcing the stock price up and making Oracle have to deal with two companies rather then just one. White Knights often really Gray Knights in disguise and are trying to make a profit too. Usually hostile takeovers are preceeded by months of slowly accumulating the stock of the takeover target. However there is a point, I think 5% at which the company has to notify the other company that they are targetted for aquisition. And I think the targetted company can get an injuntion against the other company enjoining them from buying more stock until the shareholders meet.
They are long and costly bloody battles that are usually done to scuttle or destroy the targetted company and the real benefit to the company initiating it is gaining market share, intellectual property, and other desired assets to the detriment of the targetted company.
Hey, I think we oughta code this up and make an mmorpg out of it!
Thats my bastardization of hostile takeovers.
The problem with this quote is that it refers to the sales force.
As a developer in the server technologies division of Oracle, I'd have to say that I don't see the "intense competition" that is mentioned. Within my group of about 50-100 (that is, all of the people below the closest VP), there is a true spirit of cooperation. If I have a problem with a specific line of code or a new technology I am learning, there are many other people on the team who are willing to help (just as I am willing to help them), even if they are not working on the same project as me. I know it sounds idealistic, but that's what the real situation is in development.
This cooperation even extends to the H-1Bs, and all of the other recent immigrants with whom I work. I'm one of the few people in my group that was born in America and speaks English natively. However, I look at having this diversity in the group as a positive and not a negative as it brings different viewpoints to technical discussions and makes non-technical discussions a little more interesting.
Now, sometimes there is a level of competition between teams, as each team thinks it knows the best approach to a given problem. But that is healthy, and it forces a detailed refinement of the approaches so that the "higher ups" can make a decision regarding which approach is most appropriate.
So, I can't speak for the sales force, but I don't know if the development cultures are as different as the quote suggests.
At two previous jobs I used PeopleSoft's suite and found it lacking. At one I did a bit of reverse engineering on the database, and I had perl scripts generating better reports than their $x million software, which also crashed daily. (Nobody seemed to know exactly what x was, but afaict everybody who had to do with the decision to use PeopleSoft no longer worked there. Which might tell you something.) Oh, and for all the article's 'PeopleSoft is (used to be) a caring company' lines, I can assure you that once they have your money they don't care the slightest about their customers, even when you're still paying for service.
On the other hand, during that same period, I talked to a number of people about Oracle's suite (Oracle E-Business Suite, OEBS) as a potential replacement. There are lots of sites talking about all the money and time people save using OEBS, just as there are for PeopleSoft. But every person I actually talked to said, essentially, that it was crap and they regretted it, but don't tell anyone.
So, I guess my point is that both of them are basically crap software that got their reputation because no public company would ever admit to their shareholders that their well-researched software decision was a multi-million dollar disaster. So they deserve each other.
And on that note, I think I'm going to post this anonymously, since even though it's all true libel suites are time consuming.