Who the f* cares what Wall Street thinks (an oxymoron) about Sun Microsystems? Wall Street is piled up to the gills with first rate morons who aren’t fit to hold a candle to anyone at Sun, much less determine their “value” and decide their fate.

But that’s what you get when you go public. Filth and other entities like Southern Asset Management determining whether you live or die. That’s a joke. Go private, yesterday. De-list so you can get things turned around. The market changed, is that somehow Sun’s fault? The dot.com bubble collapsed- was that bubble somehow Sun’s doing? This is not a story about a technology company that can’t make products people want. This is a story about a bunch of amphetamine-gulping, Ayn Rand reading coke-heads who have turned Sun into their presumptive vehicle to get their next money-high from.

Dump them, then go back to work.

Instead of trying to make the OS flashy, with the use of souped up GUI’s, Flash, mp3
players, dvd players etc, SUN has been spending the past 30 years getting
solaris to scale to an obscene amount of processors, not melt when it reaches
a load of more that 5.

I think they are their priorities for an enterprise OS, which is more than what i can say about other companies.

Even if it were to be taken private (under a different management team), one would have to sell off non-core/under-performing assets and focus on its core strength (whatever that is). That option would still entail laying off a significant number of employees, increasing operational efficiency, etc. Frankly, it would be similar to the IBM takeover case except that there might be some differences in what gets hived off. While I agree Sun might have options other than an IBM takeover, I think Sun would have to evolve into a completely different (and smaller) company with all the other options.

MySQL has forked several times and almost no one considers MySQL the official one any more. Open Office has forked and most people use the one at Novel as the official tree now. Sparc will be killed off or sold to Fujistu no matter what happens. Solaris has been dyeing for years and no one is going to risk rolling out new deployments now unless they absolutely have no other choice.

With so much tech already being virtualized Java has less and less meaning. After all why do you need a virtual machine if you are already running in a virtual machine? There is still some value in Java for performing shake downs but that is about it.

None of it adds up to 8 billion even after you take the cash, property and other fairly liquid assets into account.