Sun bought MySQL.
Also, Sun’s CEO {has a blog, doesn’t know how to resize images other than changing the HTML attributes}.
Remember back when they were a little below $5 a share and I said I thought they were going somewhere?
Next time I’m putting my money where my mouth is. They closed at $15.92 a share on Friday.
Of course, some are wondering whether this was a good buy. Not necessarily whether MySQL is good (it’s perhaps the most widely-used database in the world), but whether it makes sense to pay a billion dollars for it, when it’s (1) primarily an OpenSource product, and (2) going to take something like 20 years of revenues to break even. While I don’t quite buy the bit about it being a conspiracy with Oracle to kill the project, you should check out the page they link to, Sun’s list of acquisitions. It’s so bad that Sun appears to have a photograph of a dumpster with the Sun logo on it. (Okay, it’s a shipping crate. But it doesn’t make a ton of sense, and you have to grant that it looks a little bit like a dumpster.) It reminds me of when Sun bought Cobalt for $2 billion, and Cobalt went belly-up shortly thereafter. (I still think RaQs could be hot sellers today, by the way, if they were still being made. To take a company doing incredibly well and have it go belly-up in under a year takes some incredible mis-management.)
Things I care 0% about:
- Norman Miller: No offense to his fans, but I’ve never even heard of him. It’s sad that another human is dead, sure, but if we don’t care when the 997th child of the day dies from malaria, why do we care that Normal Miller died?
- The TV guild strikes. I don’t watch much TV. The Daily Show is funny… But if Jon Stewart is really funny, he should write his own stuff. Same for The Office. I can just not watch the TV shows. I usually don’t anyway.
- The Harry Potter lexicon (?) being delayed.
- Whether or not Michael Jackson will retain ownership of Neverland ranch.
- Statistics about daylight savings time.
News that I care about >5% that seems to have received <5% of the news’ attention:
In business, and really just life, it’s important to plan for the long-term. In a lot of publicly-traded companies, managers have incentives to manage for the short-term: if they boost the company’s numbers for the year, they get huge bonuses. The plan doesn’t account for the fact that they may well have gotten there by sabotaging the company’s future.
But the long term is different from the absurdly long term. I’m sitting here reading an article about how Merrimack needs to replace its manhole covers. There are two plans; one is very expensive but will last us 50 years. The other is significantly cheaper, but there’s a chance that, in a couple of decades, they might need to be replaced again.
I guess the right way to look at it is the total cost over time. But frankly, in 20-25 years, I’m going to be in my 40’s, and probably not living in Merrimack. I’m not going to think, “Man, I wish we’d spend more on manhole covers.” I won’t even remember that we replaced them 20 years ago.
One of my classes this semester is called Strategic Management. Some classmates presented their “strategic recommendations” for a golf company. One of their plans was aimed at growing the company’s market share over 100 years. I had to choke back my laughter when they said this.
It’s important to plan for the future. Doing something that you know will endanger your company in the future is a bad idea. You always want to be thinking of the future. But how can you know what the golf industry is going to be like in 50 years? How can you know what the economy will be like? For a five-year plan you can infer that it won’t change too much, besides a little technological advancement. But if anyone ever gives you a 100-year plan for their company, I encourage you to crack up laughing. I almost did, at least.
Dubai just bought 19.99% of NASDAQ.
I’m no economic nationalist, but this is, umm… bad.
So I linked in my last post to the Wikipedia page on mergers and acquisitions, mostly just to clarify what M&As were.
But I ended up perusing the subject a bit, and it gets downright crazy. There’s a whole bunch of hostile takeovers. (Basically, where the board of a company doesn’t agree to be bought out by another company.) And there’s a whole section, Tactics against hostile takeover, which is an amusing read just for the names. A lot of them are downright crazy: the Scorched-earth defense has a company basically destroying its most valuable assets so that it’s less attractive for a takeover. (I’ve been looking for a reason to use the phrase, “Cutting off your nose to spite your face” lately. This is it.)
But the article, Nancy Reagan Defense began the best part. The Defense is to “just say no,” but this is where it gets crazier. They first cite the example of Comcast trying to take over Walt Disney (is this for real?!), and then quote an analyst who mentioned that and another defense: the Pac-Man defense.
The Pac-Man defense is maybe my favorite. When a company is attempting a hostile takeover of your company, your company tries starts buying up shares of that company, to keep them from taking you over. (So you’re basically doing a hostile takeover of the people trying to do a hostile takeover on you.)
My head hurts. I’m going to bed.