2010/4/5 Мартин Бохниг (Martin Bochnig) <[email protected]>: > James: For 3 pretty ROI-worthless aquisitions alone (Cobalt, STK and > MySQL) Sun's top-management spent 10 Billion USD (ten thousand > millions!!!). > Every time the behaved like kids: At hopelessly overheated markets - > instead of selling something - they bought! Obviously the paid way > overpriced amounts for much too little counter-valueadd. > > > If you closely watched the NYSE charts over the years you should know, > that these 10 Billions are more $$$, than Sun ever managed to generate > as a profit in all these years summed up. > > To me that appears to be more related to Sun's liquidity problems. > And those were indeed severe management faults at the HIGHEST levels.
During a recession, a company should cheaply acquire what it can get. During overheated times, one should sell a few sub-enterprises for lots of cash. Sun did the exact opposite: In both overheated times (2000 and 2005till2007) and in both recessions (after 911 and now). Effectively they spent their gold reserves for worthless ROI. Which brought them into a shortage of cash which could no longer simply be compensated through mass-layoffs. At the end they were forced to give themselves away for a few pennies! p.s. Another aspect of their strategic mistakes was, that they focused too much on a single market, while neglecting the rest. When that single market suddenly collapsed (US market, and there only the TOP 500 enterprises and banks), they had a problem. Also, they produced wonderful Ad´s but did not distribute them sufficiently. And they didnt use enough distribution channels for their hardware. When I wanted to spen unbelievable EUR 1900,- for a pretty minimalistic Sun Blade 150 with 128MB memory (!) in 2003, it took them 2 or 3 weeks until I had it. And I could only order it via FAX. Compare this to how Dell does it! %mab _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
