Will Scott McNealy and Carl Icahn take Sun private? 1 comment

I’ve speculated before about Sun taking itself private – it certainly has the capability to do so, even withstanding the dents to it’s balance sheet due to the questionable purchases of StorageTek and MySQL.

News comes from iNewswire that McNealy has resigned from his position at Sun to head up an investment team which will be launching a counter-bid for Sun.

With Paul Ottelini of Intel’s comments that Sun had been hawking itself around Silicon Valley, it’s clear that Jonathan Schwartz either:

• sees no future for Sun as a stand-alone company
• is trying to sell the company while he can recoup some value from it
• has been pushed down this path by Sun investors who don’t understand IT or R&D (yes Southwestern Asset Management, I’m looking at you)

The last point seems the most likely – with the current economic conditions, many investment funds are desperate to recoup whatever cash they can in the short term, as investors panic and want to pull their money out or re-balance their portfolios.

If Scott and his team can follow through, this can only mean good news for Sun and it’s customer base. Like Steve Jobs at Apple, Scott has the narrow focus to push through his vision of how things should be done. Whether he can pull off the whole Jobsian Messiah thing remains to be seen, but I’d place far more credence in that happening than IBM doing anything other than asset stripping the company.

Have a read through the iNewswire release yourself and see what you think.