Sun Microsystems today elevated Stuart Wells to head Sales based on the “success” he’s had “taking back Wall Street” over the last couple of years; all I can say is that Wells did little to impress me when he was running the iPlanet Products group. BusinessWeek is reporting a rumor that Scott McNealey, Mr. 189th on Forbes’ Executive Efficiency list, is working with an LBO firm to take Sun private and I suppose that he’s figuring that if no one else wants to capitalize on the company’s pile of cash he will. Sun stock was down a dime on the day. Non-plussed?
Later: McNealey says the rumors are a shortseller’s fantasy and the market mostly agreed with SUNW closing up only 18 cents. Someone on the Sun Alumni mailing list suggested this is the desired result if the hedge fund, when the market fully discounts the rumor, sold short at the open this morning and covers when the price bottoms out in a few days or weeks. And then turns around to use these profits to fund the not-so-false buyout. Contrast that with the inside view from Vault’s Sun Employee Surveys, which seem uniformly negative and pessimistic. Most of the people I know still working there are doing so only because of the big paycheck, low pressure to deliver–low in the sense of consequences for poor performance–and the difficulty finding comparable packages elsewhere.
BillSaysThis 