New poll: Who do you think is buying Sun?

Well, as Sun is 'The Rumor Company' (I'm gonna trademark it before Michael Dell thinks about it...), and now it seems that everybody is speculating about who is going to buy Sun now that the shares are quite low, I'm opening a poll so I can recall your opinion of who should I start negotiating the selling of the company to.
It is not who you'd like to be buying Sun, but who you think would buy Sun most probably.

I'll give you some clues:

-HP: Well, after buying Compaq and EDS, why not buying the only real competitor left in the market? They'd gain a real operating system of their own and the software they lack in the middleware space. This would ramp them up to match and even overtake IBM. It is said that Don Grantham was negotiating with them and as no agreement was met, they decided to hire him. Who knows...

-IBM: They make a lot of money with Java, so they might want to control it and prevent HP taking control over it and become a formidable enemy.

-Oracle: They buy anything, so, why not entering the server market to complement its database offer? Besides, they'd buy a decent Identity and middleware software to abandon their own crappy one, and again, they'd gain control over Java. Besides that, they'd end up killing MySQL at once...

-Fujitsu: Everybody say that this would be fantastic for Fujitsu, as they'd gain a strong position in EMEA and USA, markets where they are weak selling servers, and complementing the APAC area, where they are pretty stronger than Sun. Besides, they'd get a cool middleware and Identity software and Java, and over all Solaris, would be under their control. But, I think this would be a bad move for them, as there would only be one SPAR vendor in the World, so the offer of this kind of server would be far less attractive.

-SAP: Well, they are getting now into the Identity market, and so buying a real Identity player, and having Java on their own would be an asset for the future. Apart form this, most SAP installations are running over Oracle, so shifting MySQL to be a real alternative to Oracle would be very interesting for them (and they'd kick Oracle for once in a while). What I don't like is that they speak German and I'm a little old to learn it right now...

-Sony: You may not know it, but in every BluRay there is a Java embedded, and we are paid for that. Apart from this, both companies are absolutely complementaries, and would cover the enterprise market and the consumer market (VAIO laptops, Play Stations, etc.). I'll write about this in a further post.

-Google: So far they build their own gear, so they'd be interested in a real hardware maker to improve their design and make a real server, and tweak a little more Solaris and substitute their crappy Google-OS. They are also trying to enter the mobile phone market, so Java-ME is something interesting to count on. And of course, Java would be very interested to be under their control.

-Microsoft: Maybe they are not at last interested in the server market, but they'd might maintain that line of business to gain credibility in the datacenter area, where nobody sane would use Micro$oft for anything really serious, like transfering money. They'd be very interested in Solaris, in using its kernel for future Windows Server versions and gain credibility. Also Java is an interesting asset (as .NET is a cheap copy of it at last), so they'd might make them converge and gain traction among developers. Also, they'd get an interesting stack of Identity and Middleware software to gain installed base, not to mention that they'd kill StarOffice to save their own Office Suite.

-Nestle: Well, why not... they are a big corporation, I can't think of a reason why they should not buy Sun...

Microsoft is hiring Seinfeld, really?

I must confess I didn't believe this piece of news until I read it here... (sorry Dan, I should have believed you, but here at Sun the only one that remembers 'yada yada yada' Seinfeld is Tamara from Software -I guess she is from software, she never talks about irons...)

Steve (Ballmer), are you nuts? Are you really spending $300 M in a marketing campaign to save Vista -after you even recognized that it is only worthy as a weapon against its own users? Are you paying $10M to that guy to appear next to Bill Gates to make people think that the system is cool...?

Wait, I know understand your move, I should have supposed so: you are a genius!!! You are afraid that the old man may come back some day to threaten your position, so you are ruining his image by associating him to that retired comic and so he'll never come back to Micro$oft... Brilliant!!!
I have to do something like that with Jonathan when his time arrives... soon...

By the way, save those 300 million, you are gonna need them to hire our Solaris kernel for your Windows 7 (ZFS is for free, in shake of our friendship).

Mobile Enterprise Platform - MEP

Yes, we are after the mobile market, Google is not the only one constructing and Android our there (hehehe, I'm so funny...).

What puzzles me out most of this article is to be aware that Sybase is still existing... Amazing, I thought they were with Netscape, somewhere in the cyberspace...

Is EMC buying StorageTek?

There is rumor out there saying that we are selling the tape division (StorageTek) to our competitor EMC.
I have to say, without no doubt, that this is NOT true (they didn't accept to buy Sun completely, then the price we offer them to sell just the tape division was to high for them, not to mention that they, in no way, agreed to take Jonathan as their new CEO, and I was giving him for free as a bonus to take rid of the Tape and Software divisions, something not mentioned in the piece of news).

So, fear not dear StorageTekers, you'll stay under Sun's realm at least a little bit more...

You know, Sun, the rumor company.

Cloudy Dell

It seems that my friend Michael Dell is trying to do some aggressive marketing to increase sellings and approach Sun in the third place of the biggest server makers of the World -no Ashok, I am sure that the data provided by Gartner is being corrected and that WE are the third maker, and anyhow, we are the number 1 in Unix servers, aren't we...?-
Well, dear Michael, I'm afraid you'll have to think about something different as it seems that the US Patent and Trademark Office is denying the request to trademark the term 'Cloud Computing' to Dell. Is like registering the term 'Computing' or patenting the electrons that run inside the microchips... although sometimes I'm really surprised by the 'inventions' that our Patent Office allows.
Well, after all it is not such a bad idea to patent the electrons... Ashok, I have some homework for you to do about electrons and electricity... After all we can save Sun...

Town Hall Meeting questions: AMEX Card

As I promised a few posts ago, I will be answering questions posted to me. I request candid and direct questions and I promise to answer in the same way.
Ok, here it comes Ashok with the first question:

-Dear Sir Mista McNealy, on account of the implantation of the new ERP-CRM system, we are encouraged to use our corporate credit card, the American Express one. In the past, payments made with AMEX took about
two months to be charged in my account, but it is not happening anymore. So, as Sun doesn't provide any money in advance, and using this card means no advantage to me -my local bank rewards me with 2% of my expenses when using their card with no cost at all- could you explain me why I should finance Sun by paying in advance the expenses generated by my job using the AMEX card?



Ashok, one off-topic memo: ask the security office if they can trace the origin of an e-mail and discover the related SunID of certain person.
Ok, this is my answers: We all love Sun, and we decided this is the best for the company, and I play golf with someone from Amex who promised me some new platinum clubs if we improved the usage of the Amex cards in Sun, and that makes me happy, and if I'm happy, Sun's happy as I'm a great part of the company, and so the employees are happy and the people from Amex are also happy, so happiness around the world is a fantastic reason to keep using Amex cards inside Sun.

Ashok, just another memo: lets prepare a little more the answers before going live, please... I'm not happy at all with the happiness reasoning...




Note: This picture, and some other memorable moments for Sun can be found here...

Sun: The rumor company

Rumor has it that we are seeking for a replace for Jonathan Schwartz. I think I already talked about this, but I want to do it again to assure you that, in no way, we are searching for a replace for our beloved Jonathan. I need him to receive all the criticism for all the bad decisions I take in the shadows...

Anyhow, Jonathan, you have to worry not, I'd never leave you go... would I?

Bad results: No Fear!

Message to our investors: Don't worry about our bad results published this quarter. Indeed they are not so bad, we are making money again, although maybe not so much as we would have liked, of course.
The main reason why we made such bad numbers are indeed on purpose. We realized we were not going to fulfill our established objectives for this FY, so, instead of declaring each and every dollar we made, we took the decision (I cannot tell you who are this 'we'...), to delay the recognition of some important deals until the next quarter -people from legal forgot to sign some contracts on time; people from operations forgot to give the contracts on time to the folks in legal, and son on-. We have some good reasons for that: we will provide a better Q1 than ever, as we sill sum all the good results of our past Q4, so confidence in the company will grow up from our investors. Then, as our employees didn't meet the established objectives, we are not paying bonuses as it was expected, and that means more money for our stakeholders! And, besides that, less sales reps. made the established objectives, so we don't have to invite them to the SunRise FY09 (this year was in Hawaii, so instead of inviting 2,000 reps., it will be only the board: more money saved for the stakeholders as we save in hotels, flights and lost working hours!).

So, as I like to say, a win-win situation.

Have a nice summer.