That crazy old economy can be so selective sometimes


Here’s the thing. This mean old bad economy didn’t hurt our results, or IBM’s, or Microsoft’s, or Intel’s, or Google’s. But then — wham — it takes it all out on Sun. See here. I just called My Little Pony, who said, “Steve, we’re confident that we’re on the right path with our strategy of continuing to build expensive vertically integrated high-end computers using our own proprietary processors while giving away software at no cost. Customers have told us they really like the price of our free programs and have indicated that these free programs may or may not induce them to purchase our hardware at some point in the future. Our ticker symbol change and 1-for-4 reverse stock split have delivered great results. My groundbreaking CEO blog and constant public speaking engagements are boosting Sun’s reputation for transparency and possibly or possibly not winning us new customers every day. Our $1 billion MySQL acquisition is delivering higher operating costs and a charge to earnings, as well as bringing in loads of new customers who are downloading the free version of MySQL and may or may not be converted into paying customers at some point in the future. More important, the MySQL deal has demonstrated our commitment to the open source community and gained us huge amounts of good will from people who don’t like to pay for things, which for a company in our dire situation is absolutely invaluable. Overall we’re just really excited about how things are going. And my hair is so shiny and soft. If only we could straighten out this darn economy, right? Well you can’t have everything.”