Sun Buys MySQL for $1B

I feel like this is becoming an M&A blog, but there been a lot of relevant M&A activity of late that I felt I needed to cover (e.g., Microsoft/FAST, EMC/Document Sciences).

Yesterday's big news (aside from Oracle / BEA for I think $8.5B) was Sun announcing that it would buy MySQL for $1B.

Frankly, this deal caught me by surprise. I've been critical of Sun at times, but I think this is a smart move for them. It continues their trend of trying to offer open source and/or cheap software tools (e.g., Star Office) that undermine incumbents in large markets. And it will help them transition to from a wounded workstation and server company to something else. What "something else" is I'm not sure. I am sure, however, that they can't stay still, so in a sense any motion represents potential progress.

Schwartz is an active CEO blogger (gotta love that), so he has written his own extensive post on the deal, here. Excerpts:

we're putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP

Information Week covers the deal here.

Audio From My Exit Five CMO Leadership Retreat Presentation

Just a quick post to highlight that Exit Five has published the audio from my presentation at their recent leadership retreat. The presentation was entitled How To Be the CMO Everyone Wants To Work With, and the audio is about an hour long. Exit Five founder Dave Gerhardt published it

On the Socially Acceptable Use of AI in Business

There's a question I've been mulling for a while now, and I think it's time to write it down: when is it okay to use generative AI in a given business context, and when does it cross a line? I'll focus on

The Odd Little Book All Founders Should Read On Selling Their Company

I recently read The Magic Box Paradigm by Ezra Roizen. It's self-published, was first released in 2016 [1] , and you won't find it on most startup reading lists. The writing is uneven and inconsistent. The metaphors are weird. There are too many TLAs (three-letter acronyms). Nevertheless,

Be the CMO Everyone Wants to Work With

I'm a big fan of Dave Gerhardt and the Exit Five marketing community he has built. While I have always liked the idea of peer-networking communities, I think they change from vitamin to painkiller in times of rapid change. Why? Because the playbooks haven't been written

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Audio From My Exit Five CMO Leadership Retreat Presentation

On the Socially Acceptable Use of AI in Business

The Odd Little Book All Founders Should Read On Selling Their Company

Be the CMO Everyone Wants to Work With