I've spent a few days in the Mobile World Congress (I'll talk about Java FX in another post), and just when I got back I had to go to see our friend Hurd (in the picture he is telling me the size of a fish he captured in Ellison's ship, or was he telling me the amount of money they were loosing in the first quarter...?) to sign the agreement by which HP is distributing Solaris in (some of) their Pro-Liant servers (or Pro-Lier servers, as we like to call them at home).
So, many rumors have been spreaded away about HP buying Sun. This is old stuff, they begun when Don Grantham left the company to join HP a while ago, and now are back with this HP agreement.
I'll tell you why HP is not buying Sun:
1. We are not selling Sun (at least not me, and if I was doing it, I wouldn't tell you, I assure you that).
2. HP is not the most voted company to buy Sun according to my poll. If I had to talk to another CEO would be the one from Nestlé (but he is not answering my phone calls...).
3. They spent all the money buying EDS, they have no more cash and no bank is going to give it to them (cause banks is the last place where you can find money now).
4. This is the most important one: there are no synergies at all between both companies:
-They have their own operating system, HP-UX and we have Solaris (ok, they killed HP-UX and now it is a kind of zombie after being revived, so they have no enterprise/Unix-like O.S. at all).
-We have our own line of servers (I know, the CMT would be appealing for a hardware and CPU manufacturer)
-We have our own line of storage (yes, many of our storage is OEM hardware from HP)
-They don't have middleware (we have web server, app. server, identity management, e-mail, and they don't have any of these)
-We don't have consultants (they just bought EDS)
...
...
Maybe THERE ARE synergies after all. Well, I treated Don well when he was at Sun. I think I'm calling him to see how is he doing...
3 comments:
I'll give you another reason that HP isn't going to buy Sun:
Your largest single shareholder, SEMA, has an average price per share of just over $13 for its Sun holdings. No company in their right mind would pay the 300% premium over Sun's current share price required to make SEMA whole on its investment in Sun.
In fact, the only CEO stupid enough to pay a multiple like that is already running Sun (think of the prices paid for StorageTek and MySQL). Hopefully, the Board has taken Jonathan's checkbook away until he can prove he can do something with an acquisition other than run it into the ditch. (Seriously, it's bad enough when he does this with small technology companies, but with StorageTek and MySQL, the board let him squander over $4 BILLION in CASH to run these companies into the ditch. Frigtard.)
Scooter, I understand Jonatahn was your hand-picked successor, but stop supporting that arrogant idiot with the Board, OK? The sooner he's gone, the sooner investors might see a return on their JAVA holdings, and employees can stop living in fear of his never ending layoffs.
Anil, is it you leaving anonymous comments again?
To tell you the truth: I'm more pissed of than you, you cannot imagine the current value of my shares and stock options... the thing is they don't allow me to go to the board meetings with my hockey sticks, go figure why...
Yes, Scott, me again. Haven't posted in a while. Been busy with the new job. It's tough running a whole new group into the ditch. It would be so much easier if Lisa S. was still working with me.
I went to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a couple of weeks ago. You should have come, too. It was a great show. I don't know why we didn't do more of these when I was running Marketing. Lisa always told told me these things were a waste of money, but I met with all kinds of customers. If Jonathan wasn't afraid to fly, maybe we could get him here next year, too. We can just tell him we're going to a Scientology meeting, slip some sedatives into his Pete's non-fat, decaf sustainable soy latte, then have Boris drag him onto the corporate jet.
Anil
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