Technology Industry Archive

Microsoft and Sun might not be a perfect fit for each other, as Joe Wilcox and my colleague Erik Sherman wrote in response to my argument that Microsoft should yank Sun out from under IBM’s feet. But I’m not arguing that Sun would be a perfect fit for Microsoft. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that there are no perfect fits in the world of mergers and acquisitons. There are...

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A look at highlights of the past week in the high tech legal world. Google Books settlement challenged — An official opposition hasn’t yet been filed, but many interested parties are challenging the class action suit settlement that would let Google have what are effectively exclusive rights to so-called orphaned works, where rights holders for out-of-print books cannot be found....

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My colleague Michael Hickins has made the argument that Microsoft should acquire Sun Microsystems now that talks have apparently broken down between Sun and IBM. I’ve got to disagree. Even though Microsoft could clearly afford the price tag, it would be a foolish choice for almost more strategic reasons you could imagine, as well as some pragmatic observations of the company’s...

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Microsoft has a perfect opportunity to swoop in and snag Sun, accomplishing several goals at once. While most reports have noted that the collapse of the merger talks between Sun and IBM represents an opportunity for HP, Cisco or some other infrastructure vendor to step into the breach and acquire Sun, Microsoft has both motive and opportunity to play the spoiler for its long-time rival IBM....

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IBM’s bid for Sun was always an iffy proposition given the magnitude of the deal. Big deals are by nature difficult to structure, which also explains why so many of them rarely work out as expected, even when they are consummated. Peter Fader, a professor at the Wharton School of Business noted that, “”In fact, in many cases synergies are more a myth than a reality. To the...

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Yahoo n. (def): Turn down an acquisition offer as inadequate today only to rue it tomorrow. As in, Sun just pulled a Yahoo. According to The Wall Street Journal, acquisition talks between IBM and Sun Microsystems are “on the brink of collapse” today for a number of reasons, including too low a price and too much ability for IBM to back out of the deal. Perhaps it’s a...

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Salesforce.com and NetSuite are the unlikeliest of enemies. Just a few years ago, the companies were at the advance guard of software-as-a-service, a burgeoning new industry that promised to eliminate the high licensing fees and onerous maintenance costs associated with buying on-premise software, offering in its place monthly subscriptions and regular upgrades. Both seemed to take an almost...

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New technologies and business models — whether cloud computing or Intel’s Nahalem, which seems positioned to become the first broadly popular 64-bit system — can have enormous impact on the software industry. We spoke with Judith Hurwitz, CEO of Hurwitz & Associates and noted software market expert. BNET: With cloud computing, the potential for popular 64-bit machines,...

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Helping someone out of a desperate strait is considered an act of human kindness. But when the other party won’t climb out of a death trap and has the key to your safe, a rescue is protecting your self-interest. That’s exactly the position that Web-based companies face with old line media producers. They ultimately need the content for the Internet ecosystem, but media executives...

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It has become axiomatic that the difference between consumer and business technology is blurring, and nowhere is this more evident than in the area of handheld devices. This confluence of consumer and business markets has also accelerated dramatically; it took dog years in Internet time for instant messaging to gain acceptance in the workplace, whereas it took Facebook less than a New York...

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