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Wall Street Journal

Is Sun Microsystems going to let go of IBM’s takeover offer now, only to regret it later?

The answer perhaps might be seen only from the rear-view mirror a year from now, but the computer and software maker need look no further for a cautionary tale than Yahoo. The Web search and advertising company last summer rejected Microsoft’s $42-a-share bid and its shares were trading today at $13.11.

Sun is driving a hard bargain, pushing IBM for a better price than the $9.10 to $9.40 a share on the table. As today’s Wall Street Journal article notes, late-state negotiations often full of brinksmanship.

The ongoing Sun/IBM deal debate is set to continue and be of interest to those IT/business reporters, my key questions would be:

• What key shareholder value does the deal deliver to either group
• How would we integrate the server business and who’s servers win – I can imagine this caused a lot of debate with the Compaq/HP deal
• How do we raise revenue from the open source platforms and partner this with professional services market
• What loyalties do Sun customers have and what loss/gain would the new organization achieve through the merger – are customers choosing Sun servers over IBM/Dell/HP for a specific reason
• The savings proposed how do we account for these in terms of the integration costs and legacy support costs – the new venture supporting those 11 year old Sun/IBM servers

We’ll see, until something’s announced formally, we need to continue the innovation, continue to deliver value for end users and revenue for our shareholders, everything else is just noise.

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