“Sun recently announced its 12th consecutive quarter of falling revenues, not to mention 3,300 more layoffs to add to the 8,500 employees it has fired over the last two years. Standard & Poor’s has downrated the company’s credit rating to ‘junk.’ It is no longer enough to blame the high-tech recession for all of Sun’s blues; other companies — including some even worse hit, like Yahoo! and Cisco — are making strong comebacks,” Michael S. Malone writes for E-Commerce News. “Companies, even big ones, often die. Some quickly, most slowly. But few companies ever kill themselves Maybe they should.”
“Call it Corporate Euthanasia. And in this fast-moving new world of business, that option should be a serious one for any board of directors in fulfilling its responsibility to shareholders. We have grown used to technologies, products, even markets bursting on the scene like supernovas — and then just as quickly evaporating,” Malone writes. “Why shouldn’t the same be true for companies? Why should they fade into the perpetual twilight of Chapter 11 or in an eternal, shriveled corporate coma sucking on the life support of patent lawsuits and royalties?”
Malone writes, “A case in point is Sun Microsystems. Sun was once a great company — dynamic, gutsy, and innovative. In hardware it pioneered the server industry, in software it developed the Java language — and was duly rewarded for both, becoming one of the greatest high-tech business stories of all time. Chairman Scott McNealy was one of the most memorable business executives of the ’90s, and at its peak, Sun was so powerful that it was even rumored to be contemplating the purchase of Apple Computer. But that was then.”
Full article here.