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Dark Clouds over Sun Deal

When I first reported that IBM was eyeing Sun in a $6 billion-plus deal, I thought it was a terrible idea. There are too many competing architectures, too much overlap, and Sun would lose its role as one of the last of the big innovators.

Apparently, at least a few people agree, including analyst Dana Gardner (who, like me, used to write for InfoWorld). Gardner sees IBM's only motivation as market share. In my opinion, you're better off building rather than buying market share, which is why I was so against Microsoft buying Yahoo.

On the other hand, Sun's shareholders were huge fans of the deal (at least in the middle of the week) as their stock nearly doubled.

Posted by Doug Barney on March 20, 2009


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