Saturday, March 28, 2009

A day at the races

I'm just flying to Melbourne in the corporate jet (Jonathan is tired of flying to New York to plead IBM, so he left it parked for the week-end) to have a words with Sir Richard Branson (he is very fond of the sir thing, I have to remember calling him that in public: he'll laugh a little and tell me not to use is, but I know he loves that). How things changes. When I was CEO we were the ones sponsoring a F1 team (look at the mirrors of the car),
now I'm flying to meet Richard to ask him if he has about 6 billion in cash (I know he has much more) to avoid the IBM takeover.
Richard, are not you spending your money in the races? Spend a little on me, you can add your logo to all of our computers: free advertising of Virgin in major datacenters all around the World. Thing of it.
May the Marx's spirit be with me (Groucho, hear my plea and help me in this hard times).

Say NO to IBM.


Update: After winning their first race in F1 (one-two indeed), Brawn GP has fired 250 of its 700 employees. That's a way to celebrate... I don't know if I still want to do business with such people...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fellow Sun employee, perhaps you could tell me why the real Scott McNealy spent all his time bashing HP and IBM, and not diversifying like they did. Looks to me like we're full up on SPARC and SunRay, without outsourcing or printers to prop up the carcass.

Fake Scott said...

Dear anonymous,

You don't know how expensive it is to place those little stickers in the mirror of that car. So we spent the money on that and on the Sunrise events, and we forgot the business.
Really, we don't focus on final consumer goods, and that is not bad, it is a choice, but you have to back your choices, with advertisements and a sales force oriented to enterprise consumers, for instance, and we don't do that either... I'll post about that soon.
Thanks for your comments.
Say NO to IBM (Spread the word!!)

travlin_exec said...

I would rather know why Sun with all of its great people, and great technologies cannot muster up the courage to announce that if Cisco and IBM think we are only worth $10-$12 per share that we are off the market. Lets just pull up our socks and make a go of it. As a company we have better operating margins than IBM, yet for some unknown reason we cannot be profitable. I am sure that the right direction for our board is to trade in our pony tail for a suit that has a clue of how to run a business. Ya gotta wonder how any board could keep a CEO after a stock buy back that results in a bashing of the stock from $26 per share to $4. Fake Scott, call the real Scott and tell him to tell the board to cut the pony tail and get movin....with the products coming out in the nest 6 months we can regain our position....as well with the current cuts surely we have shed enough that we can be profitable again...if not i agree...lets just go play hockey.....