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Ballmer, IBM Surprised By Oracle-Sun Deal
Geon Lasli writes "Reporters caught up with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in Moscow to get his take on Oracle's deal to buy Sun Microsystems for US$7.4 billion. Ballmer was at a loss for words: 'I need to think about it. I am very surprised.'
According to a source, IBM hadn't given up on purchasing Sun and was blindsided by Oracle's move. I guess IBM must be regretting playing tough 2 weeks ago. Unknown to outsiders, Sun had probably found the Oracle lifeboat before they decided to pull the plug on the deal."
You see, Ballmer was supposed to get up at 3am and bid $7,400,000,001.00 for Sun on CorporateBay.com. Instead he just threw a chair at his alarm clock and went back to sleep.
Same thing happened to me with a $1.5 thousand Rickenbacker 4003 bass two weeks ago. And now I regret not having that sweet sweet axe in my hands right now just as much as Ballmer regrets not being able to fire whole divisions when their managers don't know the entire lyrics to American Pie by Don McLean. We're both only human, buddy.
My work here is dung.
I can really decide if I like the fact that Oracle is going to be bullying Microsoft going forward or hate the fact that Oracle is probably more evil than Microsoft now.
I'm as surprised as he. I still can't believe it. It won't be real for me until Taco posts the dupe here on /.
More music, fewer hits
Aww, poor IBM. This is why you don't withdraw bids, you ask for counter-offers. Otherwise, you get blindsided by someone willing to do some give and take. This is probably the best outcome though. Microsoft didn't need another addition to their roster of stuff they've co-opted, and IBM should be doing more development instead of acquisitions.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
That Ballmer had no prepared spin is amazing.
...developers, developers, developers, developers.....ahhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There was an article published online several months ago explaining why Oracle and Sun were a good fit. All of Oracle's application server architecture is built around Java. J2EE rules the Oracle roost. Oracle will pull the plug on selling servers, they wanted Java and Solaris. Solaris gives them SIGNIFICANT leverage over Redhat when working deals for large installs of Oracle. They can bundle a complete solution, even down to the hardware and lock EVERYONE else out of big deals.
Lots of analysts saw this as a possible deal, and McNealy was extremely arrogant in walking away from IBM so you had to figure something was up.
Sounds like the brass at Microsoft is suffering brain drain of its own. I bet Schmidt over at Google already knew exactly what was going to happen.
Old and slow Ballmer.... old and slow...
The Emperor: You have paid the price for your lack of vision.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086190/quotes
how long until
It will probably be just like every other merger of companies that should fit well together... it won't.
I would not doubt that IBM left the table after realizing that it was either not worth the money because of culture differences or lack of something to go forward with. IBM didn't need Sun... and I really can't think of why Oracle really needs Sun except to keep IBM from buying it. Actually that is the only logic I can see, prevent someone else from buying it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
IBM thought they were being tough negotiators by walking away from a 6.85 Billion bid then Oracle upped it to 7.4 Billion.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Does this give Oracle the ability to offer total package "solutions" to their customers? Do they no longer need to go into a meeting with a potential or existing customer with a preferred hardware vendor at their side to make a co-deal? IMO this gives a lot of power to Oracle and sets up against each other two massive players in the development market.
I'm surprised that Microsoft didn't bid on Sun. I would speculate that they would want Sun for the MySql and Java markets. Had they bid and won they would control a vast proportion of the development market, from Database through to front-end, and over the next release or two of Visual Studio could unify Java and C#. As for the hardware, they could have spun it off to an interested party at an attractive price. IMO since Bill Gates left there's been a vision vacuum and the company is scrambling to find it's path through brute force instead of innovation and this is why they didn't entertain an offer.
anyone who doesn't know all the lyrics to American Pie deserves to be shot.
Shot...with a cannon...
...That fires chairs.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Yeah i understand Balmer and Big Blue concernes cause this could mean that Oracle will be definetly a big player now in someother areas that they don't a big role and could become bigger than them specially in the application servers area and enterprise solutions
I hope that the news about the losses of jobs in Sun will not be confirmed and that Oracle get the transition right.
On the other hand, big blue are knocking with their heads in the wall because if they didn't have given up on Sun's buyout they probably will have a great share in the server's market and the application servers, another thing is that they will have to review their strategy towards JAVA cause now it's like they are fuelling Oracle more and more.
Let's wait and see the next months will be interesting but as a JAVA developer i hope that Oracle get it right in the end.
...said that it was all about Oracle getting their hands on MySQL to keep IBM from doing so.
I wonder if they're going to turn around and start trying to unload the parts of Sun that they don't want. I look forward to seeing what Robert X. has to say about it.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
If they feel the company is worth more than Oracle are paying, they could make a counter offer. Indeed, Sun's board may have announced the agreement in the very hope this happens.
Equally, in those circumstances Oracle could increase their offer. Unless IBM are very keen on the acquisition, it's unlikely they'll want to enter a bidding war.
Not to say they won't have a final stab, especially if Sun is worth more to them now they know the alternative is for Oracle to own Java.
They didn't bid because Microsoft and Sun would be in antitrust hell forever.
They're the "number 2 software company," but they didn't have anything like the JDK or a real OS to call their own. Now they have Java, Solaris and MySQL, plus they have access to all of Sun's customers.
Many of my customers would have loved to see this go through because then they could buy an entire package from a single company, and it'd probably be cheaper. Systems integration costs a lot of money, and if Oracle can streamline this down to the point where a lot less labor is needed to deliver and configure an enterprise setup, then they'll succeed handsomely.
I've also seen a lot of people bring up MySQL as an issue, but I bet Oracle actually wanted MySQL. Oracle's DB and MySQL don't compete in most areas, and MySQL can be an excellent rear guard product used to keep SQL Server and PostgreSQL at bay. Oracle has a huge services arm, so it's only natural that they will be able to find a way to fit MySQL into many configurations where Oracle DB would not be as good of a fit.
I guess IBM must be regretting
I don't think so, since they indicated that after deeper examination and further consideration, they weren't interested in Sun at any price.
Advice: on VPS providers
As if allowing him time to think about it would make any difference. He routinely spews stuff like the following, even though he's had plenty of time to think about it:
"We [Microsoft] don't have a monopoly. We have market share. There's a difference."
"I've never thrown a chair in my life."
"We can believe that we know where the world should go. But unless we're in touch with our customers, our model of the world can diverge from reality. There's no substitute for innovation, of course, but innovation is no substitute for being in touch, either."
"If you look at the dollars, everything about our prices are quite different than classic enterprise software."
"We have no plan in place. We don't expect that to happen."
(All lifted from: http://thinkexist.com/quotes/steve_ballmer/ )
IBM saved themselves another Rolm disaster. If they'd bought Sun, they'd have to write down 80% of it within five years.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Okay, I'll make the argument to the contrary: that IBM currently has every reason to be giving their Evil Laugh a big workout right now.
The NY Times this morning has an article saying that basically this is all about Oracle wanting to get into the business of designing, selling, and maintaining integrated systems for businesses that don't want to have to deal with a zillion vendors and bake their own setups. This is essentially what IBM is already in the business of doing. IBM already has a thriving business model where they set up their customers with software and hardware, and a lot of the software they use is open-source.
By buying Sun, Oracle gets a bunch of software. But OpenSolaris, MySQL, Java, and OpenOffice were all already open-source. Well, nothing was stopping them from selling customers a setup that used MySQL, Java, and OpenOffice, even before they bought Sun. That's what IBM does already. You could argue that Oracle gets more control now over these things. Well, yeah, except that because they're open source, they can always be forked, and they'll always be in competition with other open-source projects. Suppose that Oracle, for example, lets MySQL languish for fear of making it compete too effectively with Oracle Database. Well, the OSS community could then fork MySQL, or simply switch to alternatives like Drizzle (low end) or Postgres (high end).
By buying Sun, Oracle also gets a hardware operation. But Oracle has no experience in the hardware business.
There's also the argument that buying your competitors is an easier way to grab market share than out-competing them or out-marketing them. That was a sane argument for buying PeopleSoft. But OpenSolaris, Java, and OpenOffice, and Sun's hardware weren't products that were competing with Oracle's products, and MySQL wasn't really competing in the same arena as Oracle Database either.
Find free books.
IMHO Oracle's track record on incorporating businesses w/o mucking things up is lackluster at best.
JRockit, the old BEA product that was (is?) the best server-side JVM is difficult if not impossible to download individually now that Oracle owns BEA. Are we going to have the same issues trying to download the sun JVMs? Is the newly open-sourced JVM going to become closed source again?
How about the impact to the various Java committees, etc? Will hostility towards Oracle negatively impact them? Oracle obviously has it's own goals for Java and J2EE (to make things easier for them), but how will these goals conflict with the goals of the other community members?
I think that while it might have been a good purchase for Oracle that it will probably be a negative move as seen by the Java community...
No... "definitive agreement" means that bidding is done.
Oracle offered, Sun accepted.
"all reports I've read in the press indicate that Oracle has been handling the mergers very well."
*cough*peoplesoft fiasco*cough*
I'm talking post merger. Merger might not be the right word in that case. It was pretty much a hostile takeover with Peoplesoft kicking and screaming as well as legal battles to get it done.
But a year after the Oracle Peoplesoft merger things seemed to be going smoothly.
Even now, years later, while they've been working on consolidating the PeopleSoft and JD Edwards products, they haven't abandoned support for the legacy systems people are using.
Dual Opteron < $600
Months ago? Lots of analysts? Hmmm. I think maybe it's easier to "foresee" this type of stuff in hindsight.
Not to toot my own horn, but I predicted Oracle would buy Sun before the deal was announced -- but I didn't do it months ago. I didn't hear anyone else talking about it months ago, either. And when I made the prediction, the consensus here on Slashdot seemed to be that it was a terrible idea. So if you can point to some references from months ago I'd love to see them. I don't think anybody was really even thinking much about Oracle/Sun before the talks with IBM made the news -- I know I wasn't -- especially considering that Sun had consistently maintained that it was doing fine and didn't need any help from anybody.
So it doesn't completely surprise me that Ballmer didn't see this coming -- though maybe he's not as shocked as he's pretending to be. By acting surprised, he makes it sound like he wouldn't have made this deal himself, which makes it sound like he might not think the deal is a good idea, which is a totally self-serving position for Microsoft to take.
It does seem a little strange that IBM is acting surprised, though. By all accounts they had exclusive rights to negotiate with Sun for a set period of time, and they let that period elapse. What did they expect? Maybe they didn't believe Sun would be able to leave the table and arrive at a firm deal with a different suitor so quickly, but that seems a little foolish on their part, if it's true.
Breakfast served all day!
Doesn't it mean the boards have agreed the terms of sale?
Sun is a listed company. The shareholders own it, not the Board of Directors who approved this deal.
Unless they somehow managed to get agreement from 50.1% of shareholders before making the announcement (which I imagine would cause all sorts of SEC issues) it's still going to require shareholder approval, no? And, if the decision is still down to the shareholders, IBM could still return to the table, even if it required a hostile approach to the shareholders directly.
They control the Oracle experience from end to end and lock everybody else (read: Microsoft) out. Ballmer likely came to that conclusion and said "oh shit." That's why he's at a loss for words.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
The reason Ballmer was speechless is he forgot Oracle was still around or was suprised Oracle had that kind of money. Take your pick...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
True, but he IS one of the few CEOs that has his own usenet newsgroup: alt.balmer.developers.developers.developers!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This statement:
Perhaps you didn't mean to compare DB2 to MySQL, but saying MySQL would serve the same place in the product lineup is deeply silly, at best.
Chances are the board owns between them a controlling share of the company, making joe blow stockholder's opinion rather valueless.
Please tell me, that English is not your first language.
English is my first language (gee maybe second but it's very close I learned two at the same time). Slashdot isn't my first priority and I'm usually doing one or more other things while I'm typing. It's common for me to stop in the middle of a sentence then come back in mid thought which screws things up.
I type pretty fast but I still think faster than I type and that gets in the way too.
If I took the time to proofread, I'd spot the errors. But commenting on Slashdot, just isn't that important to me and I couldn't care less about the grammatical errors as long as the underlying message gets across.
Dual Opteron < $600
I think that's unlikely.
Nonetheless, here's what the SEC filing says:
I think it's pretty clear that Stockholder approval is required and therefore it is possible - however unlikely - for other offers to be made.
The SEC filing also contains specific clauses to deal with 'Superior Proposals'.
There's a psychology that happens when a person bids on something, especially nearing the end when they've mentally committed to it and expect to win it. They will bid higher if they get outbid. That means that if I want to win something, I'm going to outbid him close to the closing time, or else that person may convince themselves to bid higher to prevent losing the item.
Relying on the maximum bid proxy to win things for you is a good way not to win things. You're assuming we're all rational robots who've determined a set maximum before even bidding once.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
Seems obvious that Sun was in talks with Oracle at least as early as February (when Monty Widenius left). I'm sure that Oracle and Widenius are mutually exclusive and may be the real reason that he left (or was asked to leave) Sun.
You mean JDevelopers, JDevelopers, JDevelopers
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Allow me to explain.
The bulk of Sun's revenue comes from SPARC-based servers. Sun simply cannot afford to develop further SPARC processors -- including the so-called chip-multiprocessor ones like Niagara. Why? Sun lost the workstation market on the desktop to Intel. The last SPARC-based workstation used the UltraSPARC III, and sales of this workstation were discontinued after 2007. Look at Sun's web site. The sales of SPARC-based workstations are finished.
Without the economies of scale from selling hundreds of thousands of SPARC chips in hundreds of thousands of workstations, Sun cannot afford to develop the SPARC processor any more.
Without SPARC processors, most Sun's servers would disappear, and so would the bulk of its revenue. Sun could continue selling Fujitsu-designed SPARC systems, but Sun's profit margins on those are small.
Basically, Oracle will terminate the hardware business at Sun. In other words, Oracle paid $7.4 billion only for the software business of Sun. $7.4 billion is too much for such a miniscule part of Sun. Software brings little revenue (or profits) to Sun.
Of course your comment assumes the concept of "maximum bid" does not exist. If you have to bid more than your maximum bid to win, then it wasn't your maximum bid--it doesn't matter whether the other party is rational or not. You seem to be implying that the only way to win against an irrational counter bid is with a larger, also irrational bid.
Not quite.
Lets suppose his rational absolute maximum bid is $100, and he is immune from the excitement psychology that compels people to start increasing their maximum as the counter runs out.
For the sake of argument lets say I am one of those irrational twits who bids things up at the end beyond my maximum price to win. (I'm not.)
Lets also say I'm the current high bidder at $60.00, with a maximum of $80, with 1hour to go.
His rational and optimal bidding strategy is to bid his maximum of $100 in the final seconds of the auction.
Here's why:
If he waits and bids in the final seconds, his $100 will exceed my $80, and he'll become the top bidder at $82.00 and then the auction ends. And he wins at $85.
If he bids immediately, with an hour to go; his $100 will exceed my $80, and he'll become the top bidder at $85, I'll get notified that I've been outbid, and then log in to ebay... I'll see it sitting there at $85, and the pschychological need to win takes hold... so I up my maximum.
I bid $92, but that's not enough, and he still has high bid at $97. And I give up. He still wins, but he's paying $97 instead of $85. Bidding early cost him $12.
Or... I don't give up, and raise my max another $12.. $102. Now I'm back on top at $102. And he loses. Bidding early cost him the auction.
This is why I hate ebay. Its *designed* in such a way that the *optimal* bidding strategy is to try and snipe the auction at the last second. Its just stupid. And it costs the sellers because they aren't getting the best prices (and therefore it even costs ebay fees). Sellers should have the option of creating a 'rolling auction' where each time a bid is placed the auction close is reset a day into the future or maybe 8 hours ... I dunno whatever. Then sniping becomes a much weaker strategy because even if you bid at the last second everyone else has a reasonable period of time to re-consider their bids.
You got the vocabulary, so I guess it could be first language. Which would really be a shame. :)
Not my native tongue either. He made interesting points, nothing to be ashamed.
You have shown your incapacity to focus on the essential: the content, rather than the spelling. I feel like it is more serious than few typos personally.
Personally I would avoid such an auction (unless it was the only way to get a rare item) because I would know that irrational twits would most likely win
They should win. Its an auction where the person willing to pay the most wins the item. That's the point. Why on earth would any seller ever want to sell anything below the maximum they could get for it?
While I don't particularlly like the current ebay format I think an indeterminate end time would piss off a lot of buyers
Perhaps, but the current system pisses off a lot of buyers, and turns them away. I don't buy much on ebay because I hate the system. And the majority of my 'wins' are 'buy it now'.
Another idea for fixing ebay is to switch to a looser and slightly random end time. Instead of '5 minutes left...', '1 minute left'... '10 seconds left'.
Simply say the auction ends on Friday, May 3. And leave it at that. On May 3, say the auction ends: 'Today', until suddenly its done. Bidders will have a pre-determined time it will be over... they KNOW it will be over by May 4 no matter what happens, they just don't know what time it ends on May 3.
The upshot is there is no way to effectively snipe since you don't know what time the auction ends. The best you can do is bid midnight May 2nd, and hope the auction ends really early May 3rd.