About going private ... and about gambling

TPM writes in “Sun, Novell, and Cray - Time to go private?”:

The company at the very top of the list is - no drum roll needed - Sun Microsystems. While Sun's Solaris is one of the best operating systems on the planet and its servers are decently engineered, the company is spending far too much time justifying its strategies to investors and not enough time selling its products and building up its channels

This is a really rare moment … but i´m sharing the opinion of TPM. My very personal opinion is, that he is correct: Sun should go private. Our product portfolio is excellent at the moment, i´m aware of many future developments (but i´m not allowed to talk about them … in short: You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet). I´m perfectly sure that our strategy will pay off, but this will need some additional time. But you can´t do this job with a bloodhound gang of analysts in your neck and headcount reductions to appease the financial community. And obviously we have the best operating system on the planet ;) PS: By the way - sometimes the financial markets looks more like a professional version of Las Vegas to me … could you explain the existence of more credit default swaps than credits otherwise? As far as i remember the whole stocks thing was invented to find investors … but this time must have been passed a long time ago. Whenever investors were outnumbered by players (buying and selling stocks just based on the quotes and chart analysis without knowing much about the fundamentals of the company is not that different from playing Blackjack or Poker) we really had problems: The credit crunch now , the world economic crisis in the thirties of the last century, the NewEconomy bubble. Gamblers tend to panic in the case of unforeseen or large losses. Long time investors look at them as a chance (Evidence: The horde of investors versus Warren Buffet at Goldman Sachs) Perhaps we should introduce a tax on stock trading: The shorter you hold a financial product, the more tax you pay on it. When you buy some stocks or papers to hold them for years (retirement funds or something like that) you would pay no taxes on the stocks. The more speculative a financial product is, the more tax you pay on it. Maybe such a instrument would give us a sane, a investors stock market back (at least we could pay the next “butt-saving-bailout” with the money) ;) Disclaimer: This is my private opinion. Really. A private opinion in the sense of: “Thinking about it in the evening while sitting in my living room with a glass of a good red wine …”