IBM Withdraws $7B Offer For Sun Microsystems, Says NYT 291
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."
Purhase? (Score:3, Informative)
Is that internet slang for "much-rumured merger?"
Who edits the editors?
Re:Now RedHat can buy them ... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
of course (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Just how much is enough? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:Cisco Sun (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Crap (Score:3, Informative)
So what is MS going to do, close the source code? All those products are opensource, they can't. Any other company (IBM, RHAT, NOVELL) would resume the investment in Java & OO.org, and could offer jobs to the original programms.
Re:Crap (Score:3, Informative)
Uhh... IBM & Sun are also competitors, don't let the fact that one of them isn't Microsoft fool you into thinking they aren't. In some ways, this merger would be MORE restrictive than if Sun merged with Microsoft (which would never happen BTW, MS has no interest). Think about it: MS isn't really a hardware company in any of the same places that Sun is (no the XBox doesn't count), while IBM with Power is directly competing with SPARC. An IBM merger would likely lead to SUN's software assets being distributed around IBM, while SPARC would be left to die.
Re:Apple Should Buy Sun (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Stupidity. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Cisco Sun (Score:2, Informative)
big (data center/enterprise grade) Linux installations use fibre SAN, and adding a tape drive and rescanning can be done on-line, even with copper scsi if presented to fibre SAN via storage router.
Funny, I just did a SAN cut-over this weekend, and I had to reboot the Linux systems involved so that they could see the new NetApp LUNs via the QLogic HBAs.
Not sure about tape drives, but new LUNs seem to need a reboot from my experience. (And yes, I tried sending strange incantations to various /proc entries to re-scan the bus--no joy.)
I like Linux on my work desktop, but like Solaris on my servers.
Re:Cisco Sun (Score:2, Informative)
Firstly, I'm trying to grok why NVIDIA drivers matter.. oh yes, the matter because you're worried about workstations.. like in your mother's basement. We're talking about men's computers here.
Secondly, ZFS? I've had no problems.. and it sounds like my iron is a hell of a lot heavier than yours, needle dick.
Penny pinching for the deal (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Now RedHat can buy them ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Crap (Score:3, Informative)
Ask and you shall receive [lotus.com]. Thats right, IBM has already made an OpenOffice-based Lotus suite.
Re:Crap (Score:3, Informative)
OpenOffice is down to about 24 full-time developers.
Sun has invested enormous sums in trying to make OpenOffice a competitive office suite.
But the suite is all it has.
Microsoft can deliver an off the shelf solution for everything your business needs.
Microsoft can employ thousands of specialists whose only job is to study and understand office work.
It can employ hundreds more in testing innovations like the ribbon.
It can spend a billion dollars on web based resources exclusively for Office users and call it money well spent.
When mega-projects die they tend to stay dead.
You've lost time. Talent. Organization. Funding. You'd be very, very lucky not to slip two or three generations behind your competition.
When an open source project dies often all that remains is the code - and the code won't be nearly enough to jump-start the corpse.
Wrong (Score:1, Informative)
There is currently little motivation for massive outside investment into Open Office because there is no need for it: Sun has been doing a pretty good job. This would instantly change if Microsoft ever bought Sun, as the open source movement would quickly realize that Open Office was in danger and would fork it.
Believe it or not, something like this has happened before: the X.Org Foundation took over from xfree86.org when the latter, perhaps under MS's evil influence, was clearly trying to kill the X Window graphics system. The attempted assassination didn't work because copies of the X Window source code were all over the Net, and the takeover was nearly instant. X.org has been maintaining X Window ever since, with huge success.
The same thing will happen with Open Office. So regardless of who buys Sun, or even if Sun goes out of business, I have no doubt that the open source office suite will continue strongly.