"We went over to Steve's house, and he was sitting under a tree with no shoes on, reading 'How To Make a Nuclear Bomb.' "
-- Sun CEO Scott McNealy fondly recalls one of his three attempts to convince Steve Jobs to merge Apple with Sun.
Despite widespread reports that Apple broke off merger talks with Sun Microsystems back in ...oh ... 1996, tech pundits have continued to make sport of continued speculation that the companies may be considering a merger or strategic alliance. The latest to do so is Mac faithful baiter John Dvorak, who in his latest column for MarketWatch wonders if Google CEO Eric Schmidt was appointed to Apple's board to help orchestrate a merger with Sun. "Schmidt would quietly be Sun's inside man on the negotiations although technically he'd be a neutral party since he doesn't actually work for Sun," Dvorak writes. "His executive training began at Sun and he is still close to the company and its founders. ... In the past the deals have always fallen apart before they began because (among other reasons) the combined companies would not have an acceptable CEO. Neither Scott McNealy nor Steve Jobs nor John Sculley nor Mike Spindler (not to mention Gil Amelio) seemed capable of handling a combined operation. With today's two CEOs, Steve Jobs at Apple and Jonathan Schwartz at Sun, this continues to be true. But with Eric Schmidt in the game as a middleman it's quite possible that he could take the reins of such a combined operation and make it work. In fact Schmidt is a more natural fit in such an arrangement than he is at Google."
I suppose. But why would Apple want to merge with Sun in the first place? Dvorak's answer: Cupertino wants a bigger piece of the server market. That's undoubtedly true -- servers are a profitable business and Apple, though it has offered some great products, hasn't yet tapped into it as deeply as it would like. An alliance or merger with Sun would help it do that. All it needs is the money. And with $10 billion or so in the bank, it's certainly got it. The question is, does the company really want to spend it on Sun. "No one knows what Apple has in mind for that kind of money," John Martellaro writes at The Mac Observer. "My theory has been that Apple's board of directors has been accumulating cash for a seriously large merger at the appropriate time. For a while, some thought it was Disney. It'll be something much bigger than a mere $500M for a new campus. Or $50M for a new data center. No, I mean something so big, it'll change the face of computing in America."
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