I've always been under the impression that there were SEC rules that prevented senior executives of companies from making declarations that could affect the share price of their companies or their competitors without certain disclaimers in place. So I was very surprised to see Jonathan Schwartz's post entitled IBM is in a Pickle (Again) which seemed to imply that IBM had some strategic weaknesses that could be exploited by some entity acquiring Novell. This posting in combination with some statements Schwartz made to ZDNet fueled a bunch of speculation online including a jump in Novell's stock price.

Anyone who looks at his statements critically should realize they are divorced from reality. I was going to write up some criticisms of his arguments but others have beaten me to the punch. Read the Business Week article Don't Quote My Blog on That . The article is subtitled 

A Web musing by Sun's president fueled rumors of a possible Novell acquisition. Nice idea, but no panacea for his struggling outfit.

That summarizes the situation nicely. Jonathan Schwartz's post seems like a lot of wishful thinking as opposed to musings rooted in reality. I also like the verbal upraiding that James Robertson provided to Schwartz's ideas in his post Still Whistling. I was going to post an excerpt but his post is worth reading in its entirety. It is definitely amusing to see Sun scramble to stay relevant as they realize that their hard ware is overpriced and they can't figure out how to make money from Java's popularity. If not for the billions they have stashed this would definitely be a company in its death throes.