mergers and acquisitions

So goodbye then, Scott McNealy. Your company, Sun Microsystems, broke the mold and made more than $200B over 28 years. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers pay tribute to a departing leader. Not to mention a Haiti charity infographic...
(ORCL) (JAVA)

Do you think it's just some open-source users who are opposing Oracle's acquisition of MySQL? Think again. Microsoft hates the deal too.

The acquisition targets: Juniper, CA, Compuware, BMC, Novell and Symantec. Others say the brands Motorola and Palm may disappear, too.

Even by 2008/2009's loathsome standards, Sun's latest quarter numbers are just awful.

In recent weeks, Sun has no longer been willing to talk about OpenSolaris. Is Oracle getting ready to deep-six it?

Oracle buying Sun is horrible news for open-source software and it's a rotten deal for Sun's developers and customers.

IBM buying Sun is a done deal. But, what does that mean for Solaris and OpenSolaris? Java? NetBeans? Here are my best guesses.

The rumor mill has it that Oracle may be buying Red Hat. Don't believe it.

Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft, IBM and Hewlett-Packard have a lot of money to spend. Here are three areas where they should open the wallet.

Regulatory requirements often force companies to keep their operations separate for at least a couple of years.

Practically the minute Microsoft's offer to acquire Yahoo! was made, Yahoo! employees began making up their minds to stay or leave. The success of the acquisition may depend on Microsoft's ability to make them happy. But there's some history there – history that Microsoft will have to overcome if the Yahoo! deal is to succeed.

On the theory that, whether I want to or not, I'll be writing about Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo! for the foreseeable future, I've been looking at the software giant's purchase history – 116 companies, according to Wikipedia, not including the Catholic Church. (You'd forgotten that one, hadn't you?)