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I.B.M. Withdraws $7 Billion Offer for Sun Microsystems - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2009...
kozmic, Wayne Sutton, wowfreeze.blogspot.com and 73 other people liked this
"After weeks of negotiations, I.B.M. withdrew its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems on Sunday, one day after Sun’s board balked at a reduced offer, according to three people close to the talks. ... After the legal review, I.B.M. shaved its offer Saturday from $9.55 a share, the offer on the table late last week, to $9.40 a share, said one person familiar with the talks. The offer was presented to Sun’s board on Saturday, and it balked. The Sun board did not reject the offer outright, but wanted certain guarantees that the I.B.M. side considered “onerous,” according to that person."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
By my reckoning, IBM reduced its offer to Sun twice. You can't reduce an offer twice, and retain any credibility as a serious buyer. So IBM will have lost its credibility with Sun's Board - which includes Sun's largest shareholders. That means it's not Sun's management rejecting IBM - it's Sun's shareholders rejecting IBM. Either IBM did this because it didn't really want to do the deal; or IBM is not used to doing deals where it needs to behave in a credible way.
- Simon Brocklehurst
This sounds like what happened with the Apple deal in the '90s.
- Gabe
Simon - that was my thought. This price thing is more indicative of cold feet.
- Hutch Carpenter
Like for relevance. Dislike for content. I think the IBM deal would have been good for Sun, and kept its Java IP in reasonably competent hands. Plus, I hate navigating Sun's web pages; it's sad to say that IBM's are actually better :P
- Joel Webber
Sorry, Joel, but I can't think of any company that was really better off after being acquired by IBM. Rolm? Lotus? Rational? Informix? No on all counts.
- Gabe
@Gabe: Well, maybe you're right about that (I was an intern at Lotus during the IBM acquisition, and people were leaving like rats off a sinking ship). I'm thinking more of what's good for those of us who care what happens to Java. I know most of it's open in one way or another at this point, but it could still use good technical leadership, and I don't really see Sun doing that so much anymore.
- Joel Webber
+1 @Joel. And some of the alternatitives are pretty bad - Imagine Dell owning Sun. Hewlett Packard (or Cisco) have got no idea how to do software.
- Nick Lothian
I like it that IBM and Sun still remain as separate entities.
- Winston Teo
Joel, the problem is that IBM is not technically competent. That IBM people think SWT is a good idea demonstrates they don't even understand the problems, let alone have any ability to figure out high-quality solutions. People tend to confuse IBM's super strong sales and business development capability for it having strong technical ability. IBM's business model is such that the weaker its staff are technically, and the worse its software, the more money it makes. Clever stuff, business-wise.
- Simon Brocklehurst
@Simon - does Sun have alternatives? (Also - it's not like Swing or JavaFX give me huge confidence in Sun sometimes...)
- Nick Lothian
Nick, there's always a "Plan B". In the event of no buyers, Sun can do massive layoffs to return to profitability. If Sun cut enough to have $1B in annual profits, market cap would be higher than IBM's offer, which would provide a better exit for major shareholders. More than possible to do this, given Sun's annual R&D budget is $2B. Re: JavaFX - it's at least modern in concept; SWT is a flawed idea, that was known to be flawed (by everyone except IBM) more than a decade ago.
- Simon Brocklehurst
@Simon - there are other things Sun could do to make a short term return to profits, too eg, try and moneterise Java more aggressively,drop the software business and become a patent troll, etc, etc. I'm not sure any would be good for Java.
- Nick Lothian
@NIck - well, several parts of Sun's software business, including Java, are profitable currently. No need to drop these if they look like staying profitable. The trick is to cut the overhead (under-performing middle managers, sales people that can't sell etc.); and cut the R&D to a size that reflects the size of the business today. I'm not sure growing the top-line in the short-term is realistic in the current economy. A return to profitability, though, should be possible.
- Simon Brocklehurst
when you pull the piece of gum out of the pack it snaps on your fingers like the gum trick.
- rob friedman
from twhirl
@Simon: I really don't want to turn this into an SWT/Swing argument, as I feel like they both suck for various reasons. But I don't think it's fair to say that SWT is proof that IBM lacks technical competence (From my limited experience, IBM's technical competence varies a lot among different groups within the company).
- Joel Webber
With SWT, they wanted to solve a specific problem very well from an end-user's perspective -- i.e. it should feel like a native app, and be fast. And they did so quite well, IMHO, even though it sucks to have to use all those native libraries and platform-specific jars. But the Eclipse UI still feels a lot better to me than IntelliJ, and I think SWT's the reason (obviously this is a matter of opinion, but I know plenty of people who far prefer a SWT UI, so it's at least open to debate).
- Joel Webber
Sorry, Sun
- Jayavasanthan J
Paul are you going to buy Sun?
- Shakeel Mahate
I never understood why IBM would want to buy Sun other than that it was cheap. Obviously they decided it wasn't cheap enough.
- Kenton
Glad I didn't buy any Sun stock.
- John Flynn
@Joel, you're right - it doesn't prove it; rather I think it illustrates it And clearly, it would be overstating things to say the *whole* of IBM is technically incompetent. However, there are *many*, *many* weak people there. Everyone I meet that has dealt with IBM - customers, collaborators, competitors - has stories to tell; and almost none are positive in terms of technical capability. Conversely, everyone is impressed by its ability to win business and put dollars in the bank.
- Simon Brocklehurst
Site Redesign: Everything’s Bigger In Texas Edition - http://paulstamatiou.com/2009...
Aleyda liked this
Larger fonts seem to be the new trend. (The new friendfeed dialed up the font size a notch too). I'm still having a hard time adjusting though. Dropping your site's font size down one click makes it much easier to read, but that's probably because I'm conditioned by years of eye-straining tiny-font trends.
- Daniel Sims
yeah it takes some getting used to. I've tried it both ways. the thing is if i drop the font down one click then the avg words per line goes up and ppl complain about that with such a wide layout. i think its an ok compromise the way it is now.. leaves room for larger images!
- Paul Stamatiou
I'm open to liking this new FriendFeed design, I really am. I'm following a few thousand people but can hover over anything and pause it. not sure this is going to make it any MORE mainstream friendly though!
Louis Gray, Anne Bouey, Rudy Amid and 16 other people liked this
It's making me dizzy but i like it!
- Steve Rubel
Well the UI is a lot simpler and that should appeal to the Twitter fans who prefer simplicity. I think the inline comments make it a lot easier to track conversations and that should count for something although improved functionality doesn't seem to be a big factor for committed Twitter users.
- Paul Jacobson
The realtime view is not mainstream material. YET.
- vijay
I don't think most new people will jump right in with hundreds or thousands of people, so it shouldn't be so fast unless on the "Everyone" page (where did that go anyway?).
- Kenley Neufeld
Ajax taken too far. I hover and then page slides down because of the comment. I don't think this is useful or user friendly.
- Alex Iskold
agreed...pretty sure the updated UI is less friendly for mainstream users...and totally with you about being open to liking it, but I'm not sure I'm there just yet
- Jennifer Van Grove
the fact that they stopped showing where posts were coming from should help. Now Uber friendfeeders can't actively (or even subconsciously) filter out tweets. That will help welcome new users more readily.
- Christian Anderson
I can see what you are saying, Alex. Perhaps there's a message in here about how many peeps to follow?
- Francine Hardaway
My advice to anybody who wants to freeze things today is to use Filters. They don't update in real time, at least not yet. No need to manually pause, and the page only reloads when you refresh.
- Ken Sheppardson
But if you're my mom and you're following say....Me, and 2 other people? It's kinda cool eh?
- drew olanoff
Yeah, one reason we're all having trouble, IMHO, is we all kept following more people until we reached an equilibrium where everything was just fast enough for us. The new design knocks us off that equilibrium. I'm unfollowing en masse and plan to add back in keyword filters as necessary.
- Ken Sheppardson
Come Back Here, Damnit - http://www.photobasement.com/come-ba...
Richard Crocker, Felicia Yue, Andrew C (✓) and 131 other people liked this
Superman, the formative years.
- FFing Enigma
Invizible Cat Iditarod.
- AJ Kohn
It's funnier if you imagine that the kid is in full slide chasing the kitteh.
- Mike Nayyar
Oh my goodness, so cute!
- Meredith
This looks like the baby is sliding forward and going to wipe out this kitten! Cute!
- Sullivan
I love the caption!
- Ms. Nakachi
Awesomeness.
- InPerpetualMotion(Gina k)
I shall name this kitteh Steven Perez, and shall damn him for running away.
- Josh Haley
+1 AJ Kohn. Iditarod, FTW!
- Susan A. Kitchens
Can I like this again? I really like this picture.
- Martha
Sure Martha :)
- AJ Batac (/-_-)
halp! i is not cheezburger!
- Ken Morley
Totally superawesome
- j1m
hahaha lol
- Jhoy Imperial
Rofl that made my day
- nfan12
from Alert Thingy
so cute the cat,so lovely the baby~
- 阿石
Why is ReadWriteWeb's traffic going down and Mashable's going up according to Compete? Discuss here:
michael silverton, Sean McBride, Rick Turoczy and 35 other people liked this
ReadWriteWeb has been doing some of the most in-depth and interesting blogging on the web lately. Mashable is seeing traffic growth while RWW is going down, though. Why?
- Robert Scoble
i prefer RWW personally....
- Jeff (Team マクダジ )
I think its because Mashable has more social networking news, and there is always social networking news.
- Daniel Brusilovsky
I know this isn't the primary reason, but I can't stand the look of RWW. It's really harsh looking.
- Andrew
Daniel: that might be it. Mashable has more "quick hits" too. This isn't a good trend. I always assumed the market would reward great work. I agree with Jeff. RWW has been doing great work lately.
- Robert Scoble
They all look like they are going up, it's just that ReadWriteWeb had a bad October ? No idea why but every blog can have an off month. Maybe they have a friendfeed problem ? However 216.8% up for RWW is double techcrunch and mashable for 08 so they look like they are doing ok.
- Adrian
Adrian: most tech blogs are down in October, so finding one that is up, Mashable, is interesting and worth talking about.
- Robert Scoble
Here's a chart comparing Mashable to VentureBeat and Gigaom: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/mashabl...
- Robert Scoble
I enjoy and follow both blogs. But Mashable cranks out more posts, and they're usually social-networking - related news, like Daniel said. And Mashable's posts are short and to the point. Quite a few people do have short attention spans. ;) While RWW's posts are in-depth, people might not want to spend too much time reading (this doesn't go for everyone, of course). - And I personally like Mashable's lists. Just my two cents.
- deepikaur
I did some ad hoc analysis of Compete a while back, and found it to be complete bollocks: http://tr.im/competebollocks
- Darren Barefoot
Robert: One thing that attracts readers other then content is the look of the site. Mashable has a nice site, while RWW has a cluttered site that is sometimes hard to read. I personally just use a RSS feed reader for both plus all my other sites.
- Daniel Brusilovsky
I think it could be the "Long Tail" effect manifesting itself in this space.
- Rob Hoeting
One reason also is that Mashable posts 3 to 4 times more than RWW... More page views!
- Ilan Abehassera
Darren: now THAT deserves a conversation all on its own. How would you compare these sites? What's your data telling you is happening in the tech blogging world?
- Robert Scoble
RWW obviously has some terrific posts, really solid. But Mashable is comfortable, and never snobby or elitist like RWW writers sometimes act in social media settings.
- Ed Shahzade /NextInstinct
I don't read Mashable, since it has no value for me. Read RWW regularly. Most people dont't have patience for analysis and detail. That said, RWW seems to be doing fine, so nothing to worry bout there. Plus that last month only matters if it is indicative of a long term trend.
- Deepak Singh
Pageviews are dead. Attention is key
- Chris Saad
the fact that Mashable focuses on lists, lists and more lists has got to be a major factor...lists are link bait, appear high on search engines and remain popular often for months.
- Zee.
I like ReadWriteWeb more than Mashable.
- Veetrag
could merely be cyclical; also mash is kind of good looking & definitely Mashable's 3/4 of a page articles work well for attention span (does anyone know what team he bats for?). I have errrrr a friend...
- sofarsoShawn <Pop-Rocks>
Robert: Anecdotally, our clients get more visitors from coverage on RWW than on Mashable. On the other hand, they get covered more often by Mashable. Still, I'm drawing on a reasonably small data set there, so that's not empirical.
- Darren Barefoot
first, don't look at compete when you have real, directly measured traffic stats for RWW, Mashable and techcrunch from Quantcast http://www.quantcast.com/profile...
- Andy Beard
Mashable seems to have periods where they go against the trending (Mar 08 going down while the others up, same with a few months ago) - no analysis, just an observation.
- George Smith
Personally, I really like RWW but I think the primary reasons are, which others have also pointed out, Mashable has more coverage of the social networking space which is driving more traffic and Mashables posts are shorter which could be a positive. Definitely don't think their should be any assumption the quality of RWW is going down, if anything it is continuing to get better.
- Steve Zimmerman
rww is up on the year & its growth is far higher than Mashable. Comparison with Microsoft and Google is interesting - Microsoft are down 17% on the year: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/google...
- Russell
Darren: I believe that. I bet that the longer posts on RWW have a more engaged audience who is more likely to click and try stuff out. My videos are the same way. Anyone who'll sit through a 20-minute video is going to be very engaged and interested in the product being discussed, but fewer people will do that.
- Robert Scoble
Andy: Quantcast's charts are a lot harder to read, but seem to me to be showing same data: that Mashable is going up while the others are going down or flatlined.
- Robert Scoble
Another thought, I always hear big voices in the Tech community complaining about Mashable. Maybe this is proof that there is no bad publicity.
- Andrew
Andrew: that is somewhat true. Mashable does a lot of SEO tricks that piss off other bloggers. I don't really care. I look at social networks to see who is getting talked about. What keyed me into this conversation is RWW is getting talked about a lot on friendfeed and twitter in positive terms.
- Robert Scoble
Growth in RSS subscriber numbers doesn't equate to increased site traffic - the more feeds people subscribe to, the more likely they will just mark all as read
- Andy Beard
Mashable is spam, PR and contests and RWW is much the same, just try to read them everyday you'll be bored out-of-your mind!
- paul mooney
I agree w/ Beard, truthfully I just collect RSS feeds, perhaps 80% I read properly
- sofarsoShawn <Pop-Rocks>
Between RWW and Mashable, there is a huge difference in content choice for links/traffic, and the SEO and social media benefits are significant
- Andy Beard
How can it be "spam"???? I dont read either daily, or even often lol... maybe once in a while look at them... but thats it... not sure how you (paul) can call a blog spam???
- Rob Sellen :o)
Interesting discussion you started, Robert. I've always thought Mashable and RWW served very different audiences, so hopefully there's room enough for both of us to succeed. Also, so nice to see how many RWW supporters there are in the FF community! That's always nice to hear.
- Sarah Perez
It's just ads with content as a filler
- paul mooney
ha ha.... and you call that spam???
- Rob Sellen :o)
I hope RWW get paid a lot for hosting a Swicki in their sidebar, but links to searches for "funny horse videos" don't do their own internal traffic any good at all.
- Andy Beard
@Andy: +1 for Quantcast and +5 for seeing Mashable SEO strategy. Mashable is working on traffic generation big time and using a lot of SEO 'tricks' (aka - good business strategy) to drive traffic. While I prefer RWW content, Mashable is out marketing them.
- AJ Kohn
I agree to point that blogs like that are just a little content and a load of falshing banners...crap, but they already built up traffic..if you STARTED mashable today, no way would it get to where it is. But to call a blog for being like this spam is ridiculous...
- Rob Sellen :o)
I got a PR realise from some company I never heard of with a product that seamed useless and less then a hour later mashable on Twitter linked to a new blog post and it was THAT PR realise
- paul mooney
interesting. yesterday I observed that gigaom traffic is down 100k plus since October. it's possible lot of user attention turned to financial riot. can't imagine why mashable traffic grow though
- Kiran Patchigolla
Another time on Twitter Richard MacManus linked to a blog post on another blog listing himself as one of the best software developer bloggers, he's not a software development
- paul mooney
RWW is "intellectual" and Mashable is "sexy". I think RWW is really exceptional but sex sells.
- Elliott Ng
paul..whats that gotta do with anything here? :o/
- Rob Sellen :o)
RWW is quality content, commenting and analysis, while Mashable is kind of "just the news". I wonder if that is a generalizable trend.
- George Tziralis
sexy???? elliot, wtf?
- Rob Sellen :o)
I guess RWW will have to have more contests to keep up with mashables. Does mashable ever mash anything? Does Read-Write ever Read Write?
- paul mooney
Mashable currently has 6 list / resource posts on their front page - RWW have list / resource posts in their popular posts links, but some are relatively old - lists and resource posts gain links from a wider number of sources over a longer period of time
- Andy Beard
aside: So no one knows what team Mashable plays for?
- sofarsoShawn <Pop-Rocks>
http://bit.ly/162UE Google trends says Mashable traffic's going down. http://bit.ly/fFyt Alexa says it's going up. RWW is more cerebral than Mashable.
- Desire Athow
Between FriendFeed and Twitter you guys should be able to discover bloggers worth reading. The best blogs are written by people who blog about what they do. I've never met a mashable or RWW blopgger at CES or any of the many conferences I attend each year. I think they are fead by PR realise and cash from the companies who give then advertising
- paul mooney
fascinating discussion, thanks Robert for starting it. as for paul mooney, u r full of shit.
- Richard
fwiw I'm happy with RWW's traffic growth, Nov was our best month yet. that compete data isn't right. I do agree that mashable's traffic is fantastic right now. A smart SEO strategy, some fortune with google keywords, and sheer quantity of posts all helped. good luck to them, as Sarah said there is room for all of us to succeed, in our own ways.
- Richard
It's because RWW puts long posts over two pages. People don't like that so they're staying away from RWW, even though it is better. :-) Who knows? And it doesn't matter. But Mashable is USA Today and RWW is NYT.
- Dominic Jones
Just a thought... Mashable's higher page views don't seem very compelling in light of their higher frequency of posts. Looking at a ratio (for comparison), or something like average views per post would be a much more informative number. Or maybe unique visitors (but these are still mediated by number of posts) or new subscriptions. Comments per post is also something to consider. The road to erroneous conclusions is paved with page views (examined in isolation, without regard to any other variables).
- Kim G.
Where is Sean McBride? He's going to flip when he sees this discussion not happening on twitter & with SCOBLE nonetheless ~ he hates twitter
- sofarsoShawn <Pop-Rocks>
Fascinating thread. Happy to confirm that Mashable's traffic is surging at the moment. I'm also a huge fan of RWW. Assuming your general case is true: one of these sites is for tech industry analysis, one is for early-adopting web users. One of those target audiences is bigger than the other; both approaches create value.
- mashable
I prefer RWW to Mashable (seems smarter and more thoughtful to me), am viewing this discussion on Friendfeed, and do indeed still fail to understand why anyone uses Twitter when there are much better choices available (Friendfeed, to be precise).
- Sean McBride
Twitter can be updated through SMS for one. Plus, most of my Twitter updates are done through Ping.fm
- MarkCarras
Maybe the quality of RWW is too high for many users to manage. They don't want to be forced to use their noggins. I'll bet that's it.
- Sean McBride
Who needs a blog anymore? PeopleBrowsr stats for tonight after only being on Twitter and FF: http://twitter.com/WingDud...
Susan Beebe, Tyson Key, Oliver Ding and 20 other people liked this
I know it's Alpha but how do you get your other IDs beyond Twitter (Facebook, FF, Digg, etc) to display info?
- manielse (Mark Nielsen)
Found my answer but these are pretty Hidden features. Only found by accident, an average user will struggle with this right now.
- manielse (Mark Nielsen)
Found the full screen with the tabs across the top for all networks, nice
- MedicalQuack
The world needs a screencast of PeopleBrowsr because a laptop's acreage is way too limited.
- Bernie Goldbach
Hi Barbara, where did you find the full screen with the tabs across the top? Was this on peoplebrowsr.com? Thanks a lot.
- SHHHE
Mark, to add more IDs, you can click on 'Add IDs' on the bottom of the page. Cheers!
- SHHHE
i can never get the thing to work, won't even log in... you think they started "promoing" or whatever a little early??
- Terry O'Fee
Terry how is it going now? Are you using FF3 or Safari 3.1? Thanks for your help.
- SHHHE
ff3 - to be honest ive never used safari.. ill give it another try, thanks..
- Terry O'Fee
Thanks Terry, FF3 should be fine :)
- SHHHE
I tried PeopleBrowsr but couldn't figure it out.
- Brett Nordquist
I'm using FF3 here (- it's all I use, except for testing work.) and it's fine.
- Ian May
Hi Brett, could you tell me a little bit more. I would be very happy to have you on board.
- SHHHE
Ian, so happy to hear that!
- SHHHE
testing peoplebrowsr.com in Google Chrome Browser and .... is working !
- Rocky
Sucks on the Eee :(
- Bec Rowe @d0tski
@Rocky I was just testing it in Chrome and it wasn't working for me. But it worked fine in Firefox 3.
- Mathew™ aka Youngblood
Wait, I take that back. I just tried it again and it worked fine. Great!
- Mathew™ aka Youngblood
I'm so happy to hear this, Mathew.
- SHHHE
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