[geeks] Article: Sun's not so cheap trick doesn't work

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sat, 11 Oct 2008, Joshua Boyd wrote:

> I think reducing the number of shares is a great idea.  If they could
> somehow go private again that would be even better.

I wish every company in the US would set this goal.  Going public might be
a great way to scare up enough capital to get some serious R&D rolling,
but, unless you have the clout of a company like IBM, going public seems
to be a death-knell for a creative organization.

Look at all the times Apple have had to tell their board and stockholders
to kiss off so that they could release something new and different.  A
company without that sort of history usually can't pull that off, so
they're cornered into doing stupid things to make short-term profits and
bounce the stock price.

Unfortunately, being a great creative company (like Sun used to be, and is
trying to be again) means swinging from feast to famine and (hopefully)
back again.  Wall Street doesn't seem to understand that you can't
consistently duplicate, for example, the demand of UltraSPARC-II servers
in 1999 whenever you want to.  No one saw that coming.  Because it isn't
happening again doesn't necessarily mean Sun is doing something wrong; it
may, in fact, mean that Sun needs to do something completely different[0]
to ride the next big wave.


[0] And I think they're doing great things by their new focus on power
     efficiency, as well as their focus on trying to right-size hardware
     configurations to keep systems just less than 100% busy.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |