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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."
Sun seems to want to hold on for a better bid than IBM's $7 billion, but there's seems to be a hard time justifying much higher of a markup beyond the $6.3 billion it has in market cap. Who wants to bid more?
Uh huh. If you're an executive in a company and the suitor making the offer won't agree to a golden parachute then it doesn't matter to you how much they are offering per share.
How we know is more important than what we know.
But I don't think Apple really wants Sun. Sun seems to be everything Apple isn't. Sun has a lot of corporate customers, not something that Apple really caters to. Java would be a nice acquisition by Apple, but I just can't see them wanting Java for iPhone applications, something that would seem natural if they acquired Sun.
I just think that Sun seems to be everything that Apple has opposed, and acquiring it doesn't seem to make sense. On the other hand, (assuming various regulatory bodies would approve it), MS merging with Sun, or Cisco buying Sun seems to work better.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Cisco + Sun would make more sense. Mostly because there is very little overlap in their actual products but their two lines constantly need to work together. (Our sun servers are connected to Cisco ethernet switches, our SunRays vpn into Cisco vpn concentrators, our Sun Storage is connected to Cisco MDS switches, etc). It would also give Cisco the biggest, baddest InfiniBand switch on the market (and at 110Tbps, its switching capacity totally trashes anything cisco has ever produced).
The biggest problem with the Sun+IBM deal was that there was so much overlap, customers would be left to wonder which product lines would get discontinued. (glassfish vs websphere, solaris vs aix, sparc vs power, sun's servers vs ibm's, storage, tape, etc, etc, etc. )
Wouldn't it be much much easier to Embrace Enhance Exchange if OpenOffice were in the hands of microsoft? That's what worries me.
The same old sad refrain, right to the last breath. I have had countless Sun consultants for the best part of ten years telling me that Linux is unstable versus the 'rock solid' Solaris and that no one could ever run anything serious on a x86 system versus SPARC. When I challenge them for specifics they clam up tightly as if saying it should somehow be enough or they retreat by pointing to some exceptionally vague Sun 'studies', again, as if pointing to them is somehow sufficient. Your comment is the same amongst thousands and it's not helping.
Alas, saying it doesn't make it true, and given Sun's current sad state it can't be all that important to people if it's actually true.
Solaris is more stable than Linux.
stable. n. resistant to change of position or condition.
Indeed.
Sometimes, stable is good. I prefer having my house built on stable ground, and I prefer standard libraries to have stable ABIs so I don't have to recompile everything every time a system upgrade blows through. OTOH, "stable" is sometimes a codeword for "sclerotic". I suppose ones view on stability depends on whether one has a direct interest in the stable thing or not.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Java is poison to Apple. Apple's whole business model is one of OS differentiation. Java promises OS homogenization. Apple has done everything it can to damn Java with faint praise, ensuring its second class status on Mac OS, and complete absence from the iPhone OS.
What does Sun have that wouldn't fork if Microsoft bought them?
Hmmmm - and have you noticed that the changelog incorporates almost all of these technologies?
I think the poster merely stated the most recent innovations to show ones that the majority of the slashdot posters would be familiar with.
Check out this link, for a list of Sun contributions...
http://mediacast.sun.com/users/pgdh/media/sum_of_parts_v2.8a.pdf
I'll highlight just a few, probably found in your beloved *BSD* as well..
NFS, NIS, XDR, Posix, SVR4, mmap, Streams, ld.so, diskless boot, autofs, rpc, news, abi, xdr, vfs.... /proc, truss, nsswitch, ptools, dynamic kernel, smp, domains, libthread, nis+, vold, jumpstart
hls, mpss, pools, fss, zones, brandz, s8ma, mdb, dtrace, fma, pgrep, smf, mpo, least privelege, zfs
and for additional software contributions...
JAVA, OpenOffice for starters...
Now.. this list is not all inclusive... but I think it shows a more than fair share of technologies, a lot of which are considered to be *common* tools, that would either not be here, or would not be what they are today, without Sun's contributions...
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Sun didn't have to close the source to kill MySQL. Just forcing upon it a poor structure and community for continued development was enough to send away the lead developers. Nobody can say yet if any of the few forks will succeed.
If Sun can ruin MySQL, I'm sure Microsoft can ruin everything Sun has done as well. Imagine when Java is just an optional compatibility layer on top of .NET, never again to run on Linux or Solaris except via the (then deprecated) OpenJDK.
Sam ty sig.
If true.
And I say that for three very important reasons:
a) IBM was sure to 'consolidate' a great number of things. And I'm sure any remnants of Sun left after this process would have been IBM-ized. And I do say that with a great deal of negative connotation. IBM has a habit of having some great tech, but in many cases doing very dumb things to it to make it annoying to work with. (Exhibit #1 = AIX boxen)
b) Our choices for 'iron' and 'OS' variety in the IT space would have been reduced as I'm sure overalpping server lines would disappear, as well as perhaps an OS (AIX vs. Solaris). Some variety in the I.T. space is most definitely to our advantage as I.T. folks. Of course, pricing competition between rivals is always a good thing, too.
c) Lastly, the most important thing, is that we'd have lost one of the most innovative enterprise I.T. companies ever. Say what you will about their ability to turn it into large $$$, but Sun has come up with some of the most innovative ideas the server-related I.T industry has seen since their inception....and they continue to do so. I think many people lose sight of this as they like to whine about Sun simply because they're a big corporation.
Good god no. Keep IBM well away from that, thanks.
I don't therefore I'm not.
Java promises OS homogenization.
I think Apple can breathe easy: it's promised that for more than a decade and always failed to deliver.
Not HP! Anyone but HP!
.NET running on Windows. And although Linux has finally started to gain some traction on the desktop, that too would come to a halt without OpenOffice.
Remember when Compaq acquired DEC? They quickly went out to all of DEC's unix customers and told them "Good news! We're migrating you to Windows!" A few made the switch, but most of them replied "Fuck you. If you're killing off your own unix business then we're moving to Sun." And most of them did.
Compaq and HP are now merged, and the once-great DEC unix business has all but been dissolved. Is that the fate which awaits Sun if they are acquired by HP? HP is firmly under the control of Microsoft. The day after the merger, they would receive their marching orders from Redmond: quietly suffocate Java and OpenOffice.
Java is currently the lingua franca of business logic, and whether you like it or not, it's a key enabler for Linux's success in the enterprise. Without Java, the data center would slowly be taken over by
Cisco is a slightly better bet, but I'm not sure they'd really know what to do with Sun. Cisco is fabulous at merging networking companies, but when they buy other types of companies (such as WebEx or the people who built Openchange) they really don't seem to know what to do with them. IBM would have been a good merger. Now I'm worried.
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