More Rumblings and Solar Flares

There has been some talk lately over Sun's SEC filings which list some interesting turn of events:

• Sun shareholders acting to block the Oracle take-over.
• Violations of bribery laws

The first one, I am not surprised at since Sun's management has indeed failed to meet their responsibilities to the shareholders for manning the ship and keeping the profits up. I'm not sure how this will help, since a failure to complete the acquisition would probably place Sun into further uncertainty and force it to go private or bust. Hopefully this will get resolved peacefully. But I do understand the frustration and anger shareholders must have for being let down constantly over the past 8 years.

The second item though, is indeed troubling and could hurt Sun's position in the GSA program. Idealistically, business should not resort to such tactics. But that is not the way of the world. Recently news of the EU filing anti-competitive charges against Intel for paying manufacturers to not sell AMD processors demonstrates this clearly. Not to mention that Microsoft is having its own issues abroad as well. I've seen enough business deals change direction due to vendors using such tactics or discounting hardware to bargain-basement prices just to make the sale, but charge you an arm and a leg on support and licensing. The sad thing is that customers forget that they have choices and need to leverage that to not only get a good price, but to have a good business partnership based on trust. Hopefully those responsible for the bribery issues will be dealt with. Atleast Sun has been honest about this issue and is helping the authorities.