Easy come, easy go -- will you let me go?
Bismillah, no! We will not let you go!
-- Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody"
IBM
Easy come, easy go, you know. The Wall Street Journal, which first featured the acquisition reports that started this crazy dance, now says that the deal is falling apart over pricing problems. Infighting in the Sun ranks didn't help, either. CEO Jonathan Schwartz reportedly wanted to sell, but Chairman Scott McNealy apparently didn't. The stock has taken a 23% swan dive as of this writing.
Still, an IBM-Sun buyout would make sense. Sun is already trying its darndest to look like a mini-IBM. Rather than picking a single strategy and sticking to it, the company wants to provide the hardware, the operating system, the middleware programs, and the programming language you need to run a data center. But Sun lacks the scale of the real Big Blue, and it never had the resources to excel at all of the above.
Mr. Market seems to agree. While Sun's shares are falling hard, they're still some 32% above the pre-rumor prices of March 17. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 benchmark gained 6%, IBM improved by 8%, and Sun rivals such as Hewlett-Packard
I think the deal will happen. Microsoft
Beelzebub has a deal set aside for Sun.
Oh mama mia, mama mia: