The Sun/Oracle merger in the news - revisited

There were some interesting news in the usual news outlets about the announcement of the agreement about the merger. I want to post a few of them in my blog in a addition to some personal comments to them. Forbes published an interesting interview with Marten Mickos, the former CEO of Mysql AB in the article Why Oracle Won’t Kill MySQL. They introduce the article with the following comment of the writer:

It's tempting to speculate that Oracle's bid for Sun Microsystems is a convenient way to kill off open-source database wonder, MySQL. But MySQL's former chief executive, Mårten Mickos, sees things differently. If anything, Oracle badly wanted MySQL.

He is cited with the following comment:

Having MySQL makes business sense for Oracle.

I´m tempted to agree to this position. Short of other news other news outlets comment analysts with their estimations about job cuts like in this Bloomberg article. The news is a day old, and all those analysts just thing about slashing and cutting without knowing anything about the upcoming business model. So much about the credibility of such analysts ;) They just do the numbers by calculating some numbers without thinking that there has to be a business model behind such numbers. The Wall Street Journal concedes that Sun isn´t that dumb as they thought after the rumoured denial of the rumoured IBM offer. They write in “Sun Microsystems: Not So Dumb After All”:

How quickly perspectives change. Today Sun looks inordinately clever, with a $7.4 billion, $9.50-a-share bid from Oracle in hand. IBM, on the other hand, looks like a victim of its own overconfidence.

and

The Oracle bid explains a mystifying aspect of the Sun-IBM talks: why Sun was driving such a hard bargain. Sun pushed IBM to to comply with any regulatory request; IBM fought back, seeing that as a dicey promise because federal regulators would surely take action based on the fact that IBM has 32% of the server market and Sun has 10%.

Whenever people draw conclusions out of rumours, they are just speculating about something. So you can´t conclude out of such article that a company is dumb or not dumb. Just such official announcements like yesterday can speak a clear language.