Journal tomhudson's Journal: NYT Reports IBM to acquire Sun for $6.5 Billion 20
The New York Times is reporting that IBM is negotiating to buy Sun Microsystems, and is willing to pay more than 100% premium over the current stock price to acquire the company.
A "Big Blue" Sun? Maybe they could rename it Antares.
See now, this is why you come to /. (Score:3, Funny)
Splendid, sir.
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And executed with flare.
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This thread is becoming silly [imdb.com].
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Are they hoping to make it a truly binary corporate system?
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What's their angle? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is IBM looking to gain control of Java for some reason? I have a hard time seeing what good that would do them, but there isn't much else left of Sun that is uniquely theirs.
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What's their angle?
It doesn't matter. As long as they've got the three key phrases memorized then you're good to go for any business deal:
"Whose Baby Is That?",
"What's Your Angle?",
and "I'll Buy That".
If it can work for JL Godrocks then it can work for any aspiring business mogul. If they're smart and crafty enough they'll be able to finance the whole deal on government bailout money and be able to give themselves big bonuses for their efforts.
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If they're smart and crafty enough they'll be able to finance the whole deal on government bailout money and be able to give themselves big bonuses for their efforts.
Sadly true. Though IBM hasn't exactly been a model for turning good products into steady profit (see OS/2, ThinkPad, Lexmark printers, M2 Keyboards, PowerPC chips in consumer PCs, ... I'm sure I'm forgetting some here). So I'm actually having a hard time envisioning IBM finding a way to turn a profit from buying out Sun; that just doesn't seem to be the IBM way.
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My understanding is that Sun makes decent money from Java and MySQL. The hardware not so much. Maybe they figure that the market will rebound not too far down the road and now is a good time to get it 'cheap' even paying high.
(Don't know - just theorizing as someone with little real information - so take it for what you will.)
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And the ability to have the specs first and have websphere always being the first app server to apply all the new specs coming out can be a boon to marketshare, especially up against JBoss that is eating into websphere, heavily...
Karma Whore (Score:1)
I don't have anything to say on the topic. I'm just a Karma Whore. I'm bent over and waiting. Moderate me!
Why 100% mark up? (Score:2)
Seems crazy. Why not just buy a bunch on the open market and take over the company. I know the open market price would rise with IBM buying it up, but I still can't imagine them paying more than the 100% markup they said they'd pay.
Since we're on the subject (Score:1)
Just a little reminder [wikimedia.org]
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I think Rigel may be more the ticket.
However, I happen to have had a new Sun server delivered yesterday, and it's waiting to be mounted and configured. I've been naming my Suns after stars, and I hadn't come up with a name for this one yet.
So as a tip o' the hat to our host, Antares it shall be.
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Well, that wasn't exactly what I was getting at, but okay.
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That still wasn't it. The intent behind the post is entirely off topic. But now, come to think of it, I wonder how far a stack of $6.5.billion in pennies would stretch across the distance in the picture. Or how many earths it would take to fill a pixel.
Java all the way (Score:2)
I have to agree this is likely mostly about Java. IBM has made a big bet on Java and has had some huge fights with Sun over the standards before.
Solaris might be a bit of an asset as well. It is one of the few commercial UNIXes with much in the way of new installations over Linux.
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Java, OpenOffice, the eternal *nix license for Solaris, and MySQL. If Yahoo had had any brains, they would have merged with Sun as a better poison pill.
This will probably go down as the steal of the decade.