We need a good merger

Fair enough. It’s August. It’s always the worst month of the year. But this year truly sucks. Nothing is happening. The VMware IPO came and went. iPhone has changed the world. Larry Ellison is shooting his reality TV show (more on that later). McNealy just got a promotion to assistant manager at the Bennigan’s in Santa Clara. Everybody else is away on vacation. It’s boring. You know what we need? We need a good merger.

I’m not talking about one that makes sense. Or one where Cisco buys up some tiny company. I mean a big one. One of those deals where tens of billions of dollars change hands and everybody knows it’s a train wreck but the two CEOs get up and talk about their wonderful synergies and blah blah and everyone just kind of snickers and waits for the disaster to happen. Here’s one I keep hearing about and I don’t believe it’s true but my God it would be better than sex if it actually happened: Red Hat buys Sun. Or maybe they call it “Sun buys Red Hat” but everybody knows it’s just a way for Red Hat to get hold of the remaining Sun accounts and move them onto Linux. It almost makes sense when you consider that the days of taking down easy Unix-to-Linux migrations are over. What better way for Red Hat to gain share than to just buy it? And Jonathan Schwartz gets a spot in the Free Software Foundation’s Hall of Fame, which he secretly covets more than anything else.

Fair enough, I just made this all up. But let’s spread it around. Pretty soon some dumbass investment bank analyst will put it in a morning report, and Cramer will find out about it and repeat it on the news, and Sun’s shares will go sky high. Irresponsible? You bet. But look. It’s August. Let’s have some fun.