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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?
I was looking forward to the merger, actually.
I hate to think about it, but a Cisco Sun merger might make sense. At least at first glance.
Think Deeply.
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?
I saw this a few years ago and it made me true to my moniker: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19080808-Ars-technica-on-Sun-strategy-over-the-years. Looks like we have an edit to make to this spot-on, funny-but-sad pie chart.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
If Apple bought Sun, then they would be a very interesting Server-Desktop combo.
RFC2119
Sun has now made my list of the stupidest companies on the planet. This is the same stupidity that happened when Yahoo rejected Googles buyout offer. Message to CEO's: When you have someone offering you much more then your companies worth...you take it run and never look back. Especially with the bad economy.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
... after all, why not? They know how to make a profit.
Classic April Fools, IBM!
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Here is a link to the Bloomberg news article. No registration or subscription required.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
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.
What are the chances that IBM will try a hostile takeover instead?
Are rher more things to consider to that than the likelihood that they could get 51% of Sun shareholders to be willing to accept a near 100% mark up from pre-purchase rumor price?
Cause if that's all that it takes, in this market I think it would be easy to find that many people willing to take the money and run. And not even that many, since in my understanding IBM could already have secured 5%.
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u lost me at pussy
You speak London? I speak London very best.
Sun is a terrific innovator. IBM is a great company. What's not to like? IBM outsources everything that isn't nailed down. They are a global company, not an American company, and they cut staff in the USA while growing elsewhere. Outsourcing is something Sun isn't that good at. They try but their heart's not in it. Keep Sun out of IBM and keep a chunk the the software industry in the USA.
Today IBM announced that it would no longer be supplying Tea or Coffee to their office workforce.
This is a true story, don't laugh, it's not funny.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Should IBM wind up buying SUN after all, I think the name of the company should be Blue Sun.
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I only hope that someone company with good management buys them out. There are very few of those, but they do exist.
Sun could have OWNED the entire server side, the way Microsoft owns the desktop, if only they played their Java deck of cards as well as Microsoft is playing .NET. Young uns don't remember it now, but there was a time when Microsoft was scared shitless of Java, and rightfully so. You install a runtime and the OS sorta doesn't matter anymore - that goes to the core of their entire strategy and rips it apart.
The problem was (and is) that Sun's software strategy was sorta like a chicken running with its head cut off - it went from the web to embedded to desktop to servers and everywhere in between without getting particularly good at anything (at least not thanks to Sun's efforts - community saved their server story, but that's about it).
What they should have done is they should have absolutely nailed desktop and server, and done so in late 90's before their cash cow hardware and support business started drying up.
McNealy is single handedly responsible for Sun's demise. Instead of building Java platform into a formidable weapon that would let them take over the world pretty much, he spent much of the late 90's trying to screw with Microsoft, when it wasn't even seriously in the enterprise server business - Sun's core market.
There was NOTHING Microsoft could do to stave off Java except for two things: .NET).
1. Brain dead reliance on bytecode interpreter in early Java VMs (compare that to unconditional JIT on first call in
2. McNealy's preoccupation with secondary issues, like keeping Java pure on MS platform. What he should have been thinking of is how to make it BETTER than MS implementation. Microsoft VM blew the doors off Sun's own at the time, its UI controls looked native (they WERE native), it had much faster startup time. The situation with lack of portability would have rectified itself had Sun's stack been superior to Microsoft's - people would just develop for Sun's version and ship a JRE on CDs, no big deal.
The only thing I want from them (or whoever buys them in the end) at this point is release ZFS under GPL. It's seriously difficult to get me excited with anything computer related these days, and ZFS is one of those things I want really bad on my Linux boxes (I know there's FUSE version, but I want production quality code).
After they do that, they can just fold up the tent and go out of business. I wouldn't care.
IBM (and to a lesser extent, Sun) GET uptime. They understand what it takes to develop systems with uptime measured in more years than slashot has even existed... think DECADES and you are starting to get the idea.
For all the bluster about uptimes with Linux, it really isn't all that great about it. For example, if you really do have 1 year of uptime on a public-facing system, you are a bad admin because there have been a number of security bulletins over any given year's time w/ Linux.
The miracle of Linux is that the uptimes are as good as they are, as cheaply as it costs. It's damned impressive that you can sustain 3-4 nines of uptime with a system board purchased at pricewatch for 60 dollars, yet the numbers don't lie - this isn't unusual!
The real question is whether or not those 4 hours per year of downtime at 99.95% actually is worth the jump from a $2,500 dollar server to a $75,000 dollar server. (I have no idea what an AS/400 really costs)
The number of cases where the additional costs are really worth it is rare. Less is more, better is worse, etc....
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It struck me when I read this article at MSNBC
The stock price doubled since the initial rumors? Really...so who stands to benefit from this? Are Sun and IBM execs pals enough to hint at talks (without committing to any deal)
Understanding that IBM has invested quite a bit in java, I can see how they'd like to acquire Sun. However, it's a bit odd that they'd offer a significant premium (unconfirmed) and then bail on the possibility of another company getting to bid. Yeah, I can see how they'd not want to get into a bidding war over this, but I would've thought they'd retracted their offer as soon as a hint of the possibility of acquisition became news/gossip without something legally binding in place. This is IBM, they aren't known for bold initiatives, after all.
Something about this sounds off, regardless of the rest of this article's speculation on who would be a better Sun benefactor.
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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Sun is like a mini-IBM: they have their own CPU architecture, their own UNIX, their own database software, etc. They both live and die on server sales and support. The major differences are, IBM is a much larger company, and IBM has already managed to build the services arm that Sun craves.
The problem is, no company (except IBM) wants to buy a mini-IBM, because it means a whole lot of effort to consolidate and streamline. So, if IBM won't buy Sun, Sun will have to slowly spin things off to make themselves attractive to a smaller buyer. The last time we saw this sort of thing happen, it was with the sale of DEC (another mini-IBM) in the 1990s. In the end, DEC had to be partitioned over several years - Oracle bought the database, Quantum bought the storage tech, and Compaq bought almost everything else. It was a mess, and very little of the old DEC survived the transistion intact.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.