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IBM Withdraws $7B Offer For Sun Microsystems, Says NYT
suraj.sun points to a story in the New York Times indicating that the much-rumored merger (or purchase) that would have united Sun with IBM may have dissolved before it began. Excerpting: "I.B.M., after months of negotiations, withdrew its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems on Sunday, one day after Sun's board balked at a slightly reduced offer, according to a person close to the talks. The deal's collapse raises questions about Sun's next step, since the I.B.M. offer was far above the value of the Silicon Valley company's shares when news of the I.B.M. offer first surfaced last month. .. Since last year, Sun executives had been meeting with potential buyers. I.B.M. stepped up, seeing an opportunity to add to its large software business, acquire valuable researchers and consolidate the market for larger, so-called server computers that corporations use in their data centers. ... Now, Sun is free to pursue other suitors, including I.B.M. rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems. Cisco recently entered the market for server computers."
Is that internet slang for "much-rumured merger?"
Who edits the editors?
And it would aid the economy in the sense of the two pooling their money, and centralizing their spending. It would also aid us in the IT field, as the post-merger IBM would sell Sparc AND POWER hardware, with the option of Solaris or Linux on either one (theoretically), all bundled with IBM's famous support. IBM owning the rights to Java would work wonders for the Java community, especially in the Linux aspect, and IBM would have probably contributed more to StarOffice/OpenOffice using some Lotus material. I was really looking forward to the two becoming one, needless to say, especially for more formidable Microsoft competition (from both a business stance and IT stance).
But ah well, IBM withdrew, so It'll just go back to Sun barely remaining a company, and IBM being competition on a fairly peer-to-peer level with them and Microsoft when it comes time to design new network infrastructures. If Red Hat bought Sun, I don't know if it would be as much of a benefit as if IBM and Sun merged, but for Sun anything is better than their current status - I just wish they would have seen that more clearly when IBM offered them a healthy current-economy-sum for their company.
All blu-ray devices include a licensed java virtual machine for running the interactive crap
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Java_software_support
I use (and like) both Solaris and Linux.
I think the "stable" moniker mainly comes from Solaris + Sun hardware, not Solaris as a standalone entity. Tight coupling to SPARC hardware (and Sun-made x86 to a lesser extent) means that Solaris has the ability to take portions of RAM offline if errors are detected, deactivate individual CPU cores or sockets if errors are detected and similar fault monitoring and recovery across the hardware. It's pretty cool stuff really, have a look at it if you get the chance.
Solaris SMF also kicks the ageing init.d method for 6 as far as software fault monitoring and recovery goes IMO.
Of course plenty of consultants have oversold this, deriding other good OSs at the same time, often without any knowledge to back it up.
Sometime back in the 1980s, Apple made an insultingly low take-over bid for Sun. When Apple was in bad financial straights in the 1990s, Sun returned the favor and put an insulting low offer out for Apple.
I don't think either Sun or Apple was serious about it, however Apple really wanted IBM to buy them out.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
According to the article, IBM wasn't refusing to offer them a golden parachute. What it says is that various people at Sun already had contracts with Sun guaranteeing them golden parachutes in the event of a buyout. When IBM worked up all the figures, they realized that the golden parachutes were going to cost more than they'd thought, so they reduced their offer.
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