As investors and analysts digest this morning’s Oracle-Sun news, some are wondering what will happen to Sun-owned MySQL, and whether combining the Oracle and MySQL database businesses would represent an antitrust concern.
In a stunning turn of events, Oracle this morning announced perhaps its most aggressive acquisition yet, agreeing to acquire Sun Microsystems for $9.50 a share in cash, or $7.4 billion. Net of balance sheet cash and debt, the deal is worth $5.6 billion. The news follows the reported recent collapse of talks between IBM and Sun.
Is the Open Cloud Manifesto doomed even before it’s officially announced?
Well, if not, it’s certainly been hampered. Why? The top three cloud platforms have decided not to participate. So it looks like IBM, Sun, Cisco and a host of smaller companies will be on hand to represent the new Open Cloud Manifesto when it is announced on March 30. And some say Cisco’s support may be iffy. But who will not be among the list of supporters are Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
These are, as you may have heard, tough times for newspapers. But they are not the first tough times. In just four years during the mid-1960s, for instance, New York City lost the papers that had come to carry the nameplates of William Randolph Hearst’s American, James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, Hearst’s Journal, the Mirror, the Sun, the Telegram, Horace Greeley’s Tribune and Joseph Pulitzer’s World.
Only a few companies know how to manufacture new CEOs. Scott McNealy has done it again and again. More than 75 people–including a number of women–who have wound up as chief executives at technology companies trace their managerial roots back to time spent with McNealy, who was one of Sun Microsystem’s four co-founders in 1982.
Sun Microsystems Inc. has been struggling ever since the last economic downturn to consistently regain its footing, and things are grim again. On Tuesday, the systems and software maker gave Wall Street a nasty surprise with the news that it expects to report a worse-than-expected loss in the fiscal first quarter. It is also conducting an internal “impairment analysis” because some its business units may be now worth less than their carrying value.
As far as I can tell, the sun is operating normally.
But you might think otherwise judging from this week’s action in solar stocks. The sector, which suffered considerable losses yesterday, today went into freefall, with many names in the sector suffering losses of more than 10 percent. Exactly why investors decided to bail on the stocks today is unclear, but there are a number of factors that appear to be contributing to the current solar scare.
There are two ways to look at Amazon.com: as a retailer, and as a software company that runs a retailing application. Both are accurate, and in combination they explain why Amazon, rather than a traditional computer company, has become the most successful early mover in supplying computing as a utility service. For Amazon, running a [...]
There are a couple of announcements Tuesday that point to a major technological battle: the race to become the platform for mobile applications. This is happening at two levels. There are mobile operating systems like Symbian, Windows Mobile, Apple’s mobile version of OS X and Google’s forthcoming Android. And there are environments that live above the operating system that are meant to allow applications to run on multiple operating systems. Sun’s Java is the leader in this area now. Adobe’s Flash Lite is a contender. Microsoft said Tuesday that it was developing a mobile version of Silverlight (its answer to Flash). And Google is creating a mobile version of Google Gears, its software that lets online applications work when they are not connected to the Internet. For these companies, there is potentially real money at stake. With 1 billion phones made each year, even a tiny licensing fee for software on each one can add up. And there is also money to be made selling development software as well.
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