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Will McNealy Take Sun Private?
krygny writes "There is speculation that with $7.5 billion in cash, and liquidation of other assets, Sun could leverage a buyback of all publicly traded shares of SUNW at between $5 and $5.50 per share. I suppose, that would relieve them of Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, which Scott McNealy never really liked. (Who does?) For anyone at Sun who survives the tumult, hopefully, there could also be a return to the former corporate culture."
No.
http://theinquirer.net/?article=22920
They've already called it "a joke":
Sun Micro President Denies Report of Plan to Go Private
What's your damage, Heather?
As anyone going over to Google News can easily find out, this as already been denied by Mr. McNealy himself ...
See Forbes, for example.
This is supposed to be some kind of business-Hoax thought up by a bunch of hedge-fonds-managers to fool investors, as heise.de pointed out already yesterday.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
This rumor circulates every few months. In the three years I worked at Sun it popped up at least every six months. Especially after donut Wednesdays went away. There alwasys seem to be this talk about the stock being substantially worth less than the assets of the company. Wasn't that what all those stock buyouts in the 80's were about? Buying companies for their assets versus their worth as a producer?
--- Location Unknown
Not really. Once they gain control of like 90% of the shares, they would use various methods to squeeze out the disenting shareholders. Once of which is to do a reverse stock split.
For example, the company will exchange 1,000 old Sun shares for 1 new Sun shares. If a shareholder has 200 shares, then this is not enough to exchange for a new share, and they get cashed out.
It depends. As a private company, customers have to accept your word, but as a public company customers can look at the SEC filings to see if you are bleeding dry or doing well. Neither is better--it depends on the business.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Private companies that do services for a public SOX compliant company have to get SAS70 certification in many cases. SAS70 is SOX for the private sector, for the most part. Since Sun has convinces it's customers to outsource to them, Sun would still have to get SAS70 certification.
It was Judge Woodlock, in the US District Court for Massachusetts, with a gavel.
[ disclaimer - I used to work for Sun, left two years ago ]
The sigma stuff is a royal pain in the ass for development and they seem to have realised that, but some aspects of it are usefull.
Unfortunately it will take time to undo the damage that it has done, and it will take longer for the muppets that introduced it to spot how many incompentent managers and crap teams it has made look good while talented staff have left or been layed off because they were interested in doing a job rather than generating pointless data. Sun's hr have a lot to answer for this on this as well - Crawford Beveridge should have got the boot ages ago, everything about the man screams management towards mediocrity, which is exactly what Sigma allows.
I worked for Sun in the late 80's/early 90's. At that point, McNeally had the trust and respect of a lot of bright folks. I don't think that is the case any more. When I've interviewed folks that have more recently come of Sun-it just isn't like it was in the old days.
Sun are saying that Niagara will be _at_least_ 15 times faster than the UltraSPARC IIIi. Even considering the USIIIi lags Xeon in SPECint, 15X is way beyond Xeon, and it's all at 56 watts. That's a pretty kick-ass improvement, IMO. BTW, floating point was never a goal for Niagara, as it's meant to be extremely well suited to web servers and J2EE servers.
I think Sun has already said that future "big-iron" CPUs will come from Fujitsu, with Sun focusing on Niagara and Rock. Given that SPARC64 has always kept pace with Alpha, POWER, etc. this shouldn't be a bad thing at all.
A 256-way SMP Opteron box would be pretty neat, but wouldn't it have to be implemented in 16-core chunks?
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Actually, that's not true. SOX has little to do with CEOs and a lot to do about proper accounting... not just of financials but other systems integral to making a business work. I've worked on R&D portfolios ("tell me what we're budgeting for all R&D projects scheduled to come to market in 2008") and systems that let suppliers offer discounts to retailers. Both of these really needed proper accounting of whom can see what, and SOX was the reason that the accounting was actually built (instead of being swept under the rug, as so often happens in business application development).
SOX helps to protect investors from some schmo in IT selling secrets to select investors (not you). In that, it's truly valuable.
Then we have a bunch of incompetent managers and useless sales and marketing people. Its heart breaking to work here when you see so much good work being done and then being destroyed by their incompetance.
Personally I nearly lost my marriage due to the hours I was working last year - and then watched yet some very good friends who are outstanding engineers get riffed after actually deystroying their personal relationships because they were working so hard. I love working here, but my marriage and my personal life are much more important, which is why I am looking elsewhere at the moment.
Of course we all got to provide feedback last month in a Bevridge inspired "management excellence" survey. I've filled in nine of these in my time in Sun, I've never seen a change other than the managers getting more incompetent out of them.
please increment the exposure to the six-sigma stuff,
... going private may be
as it is now making critical wall st. rounds via the
vault company surveys.
i'm also ex-sun (tenure 7+ years), who survived two
massive re-orgs but quit before RIF #3 precisely because
of the bilious GE/Sun sigma cruft, which is
garbage-in-garbage-out (GIGO) applied to metrics.
so sad.
janus team laid-off? shameful. bill joy-style expertise
outsourced? yikes. incompetent middle managers
still holding on only because their stock options are priced
at 3/4/5? horrorshow. NIH driving decision-making? gulp.
now, i'm still rooting for the good engineering work
in the face of such madness, though switching my shares
to AAPL has served well as household-preserving
defence. will niagra save the day? yes, if price-performance
becomes so right that amazon/ebay/yahoo/google beg to
turn the switch from x86 white-box maintenance. too late
to turn the linux tide, though
just the ticket to ride!