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."
Crap (Score:4, Insightful)
Just how much is enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Stupidity. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Apple Should Buy Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Cisco Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
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. )
Re:Stupidity. (Score:2, Insightful)
They think their company is worth a lot more than what the stock market says their shares are worth and a lot more than IBM is willing to pay, and they may very well be right.
Sun owns and is developing a lot of things that have a whole lot of worth and a whole lot of future potential.
If they don't think it's enough, and they won't succeed on their own and generate all that value for their investors, then yes, it makes sense to sell.
If the proceeds from the sale really offset the anticipated worth and provide investors a hefty profit in the here and now, similar to to successful business, then, yes, it's worth it to sell.
Otherwise, if there's any doubt, they have a decision to make, and only time will tell -- but they may have made a good one.
Re:Crap (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be much much easier to Embrace Enhance Exchange if OpenOffice were in the hands of microsoft? That's what worries me.
Re:Cisco Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Cisco Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Crap (Score:2, Insightful)
The best part about open source: even if MS hates OO they can't kill it. Buying Sun would make no difference. It's like pee from a pool, man, and there ain't no way for MS to empty the pool and refill.
Re:Just how much is enough? (Score:3, Insightful)
Red Hat buying Sun would be the exact same mistake as Caldera buying SCO.
Re:Now RedHat can buy them ... (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
The support they just outsourced to India? I'm sure that won't hurt the quality.
Re:Just how much is enough? (Score:3, Insightful)
My feelings exactly. I feel that SUN, like PALM had with the PRE, may have something on their hands. I have no info besides the history of a company that has been so innovative and also embracing of FOSS (which shows they understand the new landscape). All that brainpower inside the company is not dead, so I think they just might have something up their sleeves.
Re:Apple Should Buy Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Crap (Score:5, Insightful)
What does Sun have that wouldn't fork if Microsoft bought them?
Re:Apple Should Buy Sun (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand, (assuming various regulatory bodies would approve it), MS merging with Sun, or Cisco buying Sun seems to work better.
Other than it being an excellent opportunity to kill off a Unix vendor, why would MS merge with Sun? Never mind the consequences an MS take-over of Sun would presumably have for Java. Sun being swallowed up by Hewlett-Packard doesn't sound all that good either. Cisco buying Sun has a better ring to it, at least at first glance. I'll take continued diversity on the OS market over consolidation any day.
Re:Cisco Sun (Score:1, Insightful)
stable. n. resistant to change of position or condition.
Hardly - with some of the most innovative and performance raising changes in the last 10 years being developed and released (in opensource format) by Sun, I'll call your bluff and raise you...
So not only are they more stable, but also more innovative...
Thanks for the note, too bad it wasn't accurate.
Dtrace
ZFS
Container/Zone technology
CMT - UltraSparc T1, T2, T2+ and the new Rock CPU to name just a few...
Re:Crap (Score:3, Insightful)
OOo being Lotus-ized would be a fate worse than death, I think.
Re:Cisco Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [sun.com]
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...
Re:Crap (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Cisco Sun (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't seem to work for me. Every time I have to add a SAN drive to a Linux box (Red Hat), I have to reboot the system. There are a few suggestions on recognizing the drives while the system is live but none have worked so far. We're pretty much resigned to rebooting when adding a SAN drive.
[John]
The Best I.T. News I've Heard In A Long Time (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Just how much is enough? (Score:1, Insightful)
why "obviously"?
I'd say it takes way "beefier" specs to decode the actual BluRay compression than to run the embedded Java for the menus.
Sun may just turn around (Score:1, Insightful)
Sun has tons of innovation, a quality pool of software, hardware engineers and community, their servers are really good quality and their move to the storage segment with ZFS is definitely very interesting. Storage might be where they can turn around, they have everything ready to make a splash there. Storage on x86 commodity hardware, including SSD, with 10 GBe, OpenSolaris, ZFS and COMSTAR.
Re:Just how much is enough? (Score:2, Insightful)
They have a good chance to justify a higher price given their IP and how crazy stock market valuation is. Don't you think it's odd for a company such as IBM to offer this price for SUN given the huge overlap between them? not to mention that many of the software technologies are open sourced and IBM could take advantage of them
I believe this is a move from IBM to make SUN more expensive for likely suitors. Which is why Cisco will have to pay at least $8 billion now if they are to acquire SUN, which I think will hapen.
Re:Now RedHat can buy them ... (Score:3, Insightful)
And it would aid the economy in the sense of the two pooling their money, and centralizing their spending.
Seeing as the whole justification of mergers is to "cut costs," I'm pretty sure the combined IBM/Sun would spend less money in fewer places. Centralized, yes. Good for IBM, yes. Good for the broader economy...probably not.
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.
I'm not sure that I'd want that at all. IBM's support is famously expensive. Yes, the big blue army does know how to come through in an emergency, but they charge handsomely for the privilege. And constantly call you to make sure that you have everything from IBM that you could ever want.
IBM owning the rights to Java would work wonders for the Java community, especially in the Linux aspect
Hopefully, they'll accelerate the process that Sun has started and open-source everything. Neither IBM, nor Sun, nor any other company should "own the rights" to anything except the Java name.
and IBM would have probably contributed more to StarOffice/OpenOffice
Good, good...
using some Lotus material.
...whoa, DO NOT WANT!!!! (Yes, I'm a former Notes developer, can you tell?
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).
Before there was Microsoft, there was IBM. Trust me, IBM was no better.
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 I hope is that Java, MySQL, OpenOffice, and all of Sun's other initiatives (it's hard to call them products, since Sun can't seem to make money off of them) can find stable homes, either as self-sustaining open-source projects or under companies that won't smother them. IBM does not fit the bill, in my experience (although their work with Eclipse comes closest.)
IBM + Sun = Bad for American Software Industry (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Now RedHat can buy them ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good god no. Keep IBM well away from that, thanks.
Re:Apple Should Buy Sun (Score:5, Insightful)
Java promises OS homogenization.
I think Apple can breathe easy: it's promised that for more than a decade and always failed to deliver.
Noooooo! Anyone but HP! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.