If you've never seen actual snow rolls [I have not, this is new to me], then have a look.

This link.

It looks like hay rolls, but the wind does not do that for the hay farmers.

Too bad the Coen brothers did not have something like this for a backdrop in "Fargo."

Thanks Christy, for emailing the link.

ORACLE appears poised to acquire SUN. IBM dropped out of negotiations. The future of the Java language is unclear.

Strib carries the AP feed:

NEW YORK - Oracle Corp. pounced on Sun Microsystems Inc. in a $7.4 billion deal Monday after rival IBM Corp. abandoned its bid to buy Sun, a server and software maker that had a 27-year run as Silicon Valley's brash independent.

Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle said it will pay $9.50 in cash for each Sun share. The price represents a 42 percent premium to Sun's closing stock price of $6.69 on Friday, and is nearly twice what Sun was trading for in March, before word leaked that IBM and Sun were in buyout negotiations. Net of Sun's cash and debt, the transaction is valued at $5.6 billion, Oracle said.

IBM had offered to buy Sun for $9.40 per share, but acquisition talks fell apart this month in a disagreement over price and the extent to which IBM was willing to see the deal through an antitrust review.

Oracle expects the purchase to add at least 15 cents per share to its adjusted earnings in the first year after the deal closes.

Sun, which invented the Java programming language used to develop applications for Web sites and mobile phones, had been reluctant to sacrifice its independence, even as it reported big losses. Despite billions in sales — $13.3 billion over the last four quarters — the company has not been able to turn a consistent profit, losing $1.9 billion in the same period.

Analysts have long said the company can not stand on its own and many were skeptical the company would be able to find another buyer after talks with IBM broke down.

Oracle's main business is database software. Sun's Solaris operating system is a leading platform for that software. The company also makes "middleware," which allows business computing applications to work together. Oracle's middleware is built on Sun's Java language and software.

Calling Java the "single-most important software asset we have ever acquired," [ORACLE CEO Larry] Ellison predicted it would eventually help make Oracle's middleware products generate as much revenue as its database line does.

Sun's takeover is a reminder that a few missteps and bad timing can cause a star to come crashing down.

Sun was founded in 1982 by men who would become legendary Silicon Valley figures: Andy Bechtolsheim, a graduate student whose computer "workstation" for the Stanford University Network (SUN) led to the company's first product; Bill Joy, whose work formed the basis for Sun's computer operating system; and Stanford MBAs Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy.

Sun was a pioneer in the concept of networked computing, the idea that computers could do more when lots of them were linked together. Sun's computers took off at universities and in the government, and became part of the backbone of the early Internet. Then the 1990s boom made Sun a star. It claimed to put "the dot in dot-com," considered buying a struggling Apple Computer Inc. and saw its market value peak around $200 billion.

But Sun was slow to react when the bottom fell out in 2001. Its high-end products, built on Sun's proprietary systems and its own microprocessors, suffered against less-expensive rivals that used industry-standard technologies such as chips from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and software from Microsoft. Sun lost more than $5 billion in the first five years after the bubble burst.

See parallel coverage, here, here, here, here, and here.

Welcome to the world of Control Data and DEC. The world of founders wearing blinders, Bill Norris and Ken Olson. The world of Dire Straits "The Bug."

[...]
sometimes you're the louisville slugger
sometimes you're the ball
sometimes it all comes together baby
sometimes you're going to lose it all

you gotta know happy - you gotta know glad
because you're gonna know lonely
and you're gonna know bad
when you're rippin' and a ridin'
and you're coming on strong
you start slippin' and slidin'
and it all goes wrong because

sometimes you're the windshield
sometimes you're the bug
[...]

Now it's Scott McNealy. The equivalent of the Warhol 15 minutes of fame, in the high-tech business world. SUN came, prospered, waned - and Warhol's phrase nailed it. This is not your US Steel, taking over a century to begin, prosper and die. Time runs faster in Silicon Valley. In high-tech.

Apple lives, SUN dies, and previously the now-deceased thought of acquiring the now-surviving.

It goes to show.

Two related items, from earlier coverage, here and here, the former stating:

Where Did Sun Go Wrong?
Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service -- Friday, April 10, 2009 9:30 AM PDT

Just before the dot-com boom that spawned the meteoric rise of Sun Microsystems came careening to a halt, then-CEO Scott McNealy and President Ed Zander held a meeting where they discussed the future of their company.

At the time, Sun owed the fast-growing sales of its server hardware and position as an industry darling to the dot-com economy, "an unnatural period when they were considered a 'you must have this vendor' company," said Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice, recalling the meeting he attended in 2001.

Even as the boom that had allowed their business to flourish was about to end, the two executives did not appear to see anything amiss, Eunice said.

"It was a moment when everyone in the room knew that things weren't going to continue as good as they had been," he said. "But they were on stage saying, 'We don't see anything falling down.'" It was a "moment of blindness" for Sun, he said, one that came at a turning point when the company should have been making tough business decisions to ensure its longevity.

The years since that meeting in 2001 have not been kind to Sun. The company that had built up its business selling powerful Unix servers faced a dual threat in the form of x86 processors, which would spawn cheap but powerful servers that undermined its Sparc-based offerings, and the Linux OS, which would be embraced by IBM and Oracle and emerge as a potent, low-cost alternative to Sun's Solaris.

Those events were beyond Sun's control, of course, but while rivals like Hewlett-Packard and IBM reinforced their businesses by embracing the new technologies and building up their professional service arms, Sun's reaction was to hunker down. What followed, analysts and even some former Sun executives say, was a series of missteps that have left the company where it is today -- it has lost $1.9 billion over the last two quarters, with revenue down 9 percent to $6.2 billion. Indeed, the company has had difficulty sustaining profitability since the dot-com bust. Moreover, negotiations to be acquired by IBM have apparently broken down, at least for the moment, leaving Sun in a weak and exposed position.

It has been an ignominious and somewhat mystifying downfall for a company that, for all its missteps, has been one of the greatest innovators in Silicon Valley history. From Java to Jini to utility computing and its slogan "the network is the computer," Sun has often shown an uncanny vision for identifying industry trends before they happened. In many instances it was, quite literally, ahead of its time.

"It's weird because Sun is probably the most innovative and forward-looking company of any that I've seen," said John Crupi, CTO of enterprise mashups company JackBe and a former CTO for Sun's Enterprise Web Services group. "They were really good at doing cool engineering things. The problem was, they never managed to move up the stack and package those things into solutions that really let you use the technology and solved people's problems."

Stephen Hultquist, an IT industry veteran and principal with Infinite Summit in Boulder, Colorado, agreed that Sun never suffered from a lack of innovation and vision. Where its executives faltered was in their ability to get beyond the vision and give customers what they wanted to run their business, he said.

"Any company that doesn't continuously focus on the real benefits to their customers -- both current and future -- will eventually lose the mindshare of those customers," Hultquist said. "Customers buy what makes sense for their success and satisfaction, not what is 'best' in some esoteric, technical way. If that wasn't the case, Microsoft would not be the powerhouse that it is."

For instance, "the network is the computer" was Sun's slogan long before companies like Google and Salesforce.com built their businesses around the idea, and before cloud-computing became the buzzword du jour. But now many of the companies embracing cloud-computing and hosted services run Linux rather than Solaris in their data centers.

Sun also was one of the first to see that subscription-based software pricing would replace the traditional per-CPU model when multicore processors became prevalent. But by the time Sun had got itself together to offer software in this model, there was less interest in its Java software because they were already using BEA or IBM's products.

Marie Beeson, who worked at Sun from 1999 to 2004 in its professional services division, compared Sun to Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in its ability to create useful technologies but failure to capitalize on them. Xerox PARC created a lot of the technologies that made computers and widespread use of the Internet possible -- such as the GUI and Ethernet -- but is a research facility and not a profitable business.

"From a technical standpoint Sun was very innovative and had a lot of great technology, but didn't know how to really exploit those technologies," she said.

Observers identified three principal errors that, had they been avoided, might have allowed Sun to flourish after its dot-com business dried up. They are: not reacting to Linux by open-sourcing Solaris more quickly than it did; not building an x86 product line fast enough to sell alongside its Sparc systems; and not learning how to monetize the great Java technology it had created.

Sun finally came out in support of Linux in 2003, around the same time it launched its first x86 server line. The next year it open-sourced Solaris through a project called OpenSolaris. But by then Linux already had the support of IBM and Oracle, which eased the concerns of customers worried about big-company support behind the open source OS, and lower-cost x86 boxes running Linux or Windows were replacing Solaris in many enterprises.

Some feel that if Sun had open-sourced Solaris sooner, Linux would not have become the popular low-cost alternative to Unix that it is today.

_______UPDATE________
Things are never simple; the Control Data roots remain to anchor other things. Norm Coleman's chum, Nasser Kazeminy has Control Data roots, see here and here. Back in the CDC big iron days, to move the multi-million dollar computer sale some useful software was a throw-in, such as selling a turnkey system to manage parts of the power grid. Siemens has a midling sized tech consultancy and software vendor operation in the Hopkins-Minnetonka area [near the Hwy 169 and US 394 interchange], that grew out of CDC, had the independent name "Empros," and went through a naming of "Siemens-Empros" but the roots go back years in the Twin Cities area more than in Germany, or elsewhere; see, e.g., here, here, here and here. Nothing is as simple as it might be viewed by those with simple minds.

_____FURTHER UPDATE______
Good coverage, Computerworld, here. MySQL would now pass to ORACLE, with its future uncertain and its users left puzzled, as with SUN Java assets. Microsoft is in that SQL market, at a serious level along with IBM, and there is Postgre SQL, see this Google.

______FURTHER UPDATE______
Here is where I see a test of will of the Obama administration, and its dedication to reviving antitrust scrutiny from the moribund thing it was during Bush years. Also, the EU may have trade-restraint worries over this Oracle takeover of Sun, with at least the MySQL being forced to be spun off since it is a direct, now free to small users, alternative to buying other vendors' SQL database management systems.

See, here, here and here. That last page is the download page, you can get it free still at a low-end capability, but it is unclear how that access can and will survive.

Does anyone know who Scott McNealy gave presidential campaign contributions to during this most recent election cycle? Larry Ellison? Should it matter?

And do not forget, PostgreSQL continues as wholly open software.

This image, from here:



More Computerworld coverage, here, here, and here.

A prediction.

In a month or two there will be a change you can believe in. Small change. Pocket change.

“If Tarryl would run she would take the endorsement in a heartbeat,” says the same DFL insider.

Remember you read about it here, second.

First, it was MinnIndependent.

An effective female candidate with a brain. What a Sixth District novelty?

And I would bet Tarryl Clark would neither have lobbying baggage, nor try to keep one foot in the DFL and the other in the IP where all appearances would be of straddling a fence between the two feet.

And MinnIndy had 42 comments, so go there, enjoy.


______UPDATE______
I want to clarify one thing. I am not indirectly dumping on Patty Wetterling. She has a brain, and has been effective in gaining political recognition of child abduction problems. Yet she is very, very low key, which played to Bachmann's self-promotional skills, and Wetterling ran a poor campaign epitomized by a press focus upon Jon Bohn's alleged attempted infiltration of the Bachmann campaign while on Wetterling's staff at a time when a better press focus would have been on Bachmann's contemporaneous appearance at Mac Hammond's flying circus saying God picked her to be the MN 6 GOP candidate, and reaffirmed the message after Michele and Marcus Bachmann fasted for a few days and prayed.

Wetterling is a first rate person, but that's not enough for winning politics. Insufficient to get the job done, the job of beating Bachmann.

Nor was a campaign sufficient that raised all its campaign cash at the last minutes, thanks to Bachmann, Chris Matthews, and Hardball.

There should be a stronger and more discerning and subtle effort in the MN 6 DFL leadership ranks to find and fund better candidacies.

I've seen Tarryl Clark only once, at the DFL conference giving Tinklenberg the MN 6 nomination/endorsement for the 2006 election. I was there as a blogger - press coverage person, as were three other bloggers, one affiliated with a St. Cloud newspaper and the other two, like me, wholly independent. Clark gave the keynote endorsement speech for ET. She seemed slick and decently prepared, and since such speeches are content devoid it was impossible to judge whether her approach is content devoid when, in other kinds of situations, content matters.

______FURTHER UPDATE______
It would be interesting if Colleen Rowley or Jack Nelson Pallmeyer would move to the Sixth, and run against Bachmann. Then see how "knee-jerk" GOP the district really is. Klobuchar did well against Mark Kennedy, who'd been the MN 6 rep for a few terms. A DFL candidate, a vibrant, appealing and inspiring one, can win in the Sixth.

We await one showing up seeking the candidacy.

If this is not disingenuously clueless, what is it?

Chris Steller of MinnIndependent has the story, here.

First Norm, then the Strib reporters.

The MinnIndependent headline pretty much sums it, so read the detail there. The headline:

"Coleman: Media ‘could have waited’ until after Nov. 4 to ask about money-funneling"

That of course ignores the basic point, voters deserve to be as informed as possible and Coleman seemed to have no objection to early and frequent coverage of Franken's past humor and his firm's state taxing SNAFU. Selective little guy, isn't he?

What Norm would have, that's like the media saying after the 1978 Senate DFL primary election, "Wow, Don Fraser never really said all the things Bob Short's been going around saying Don Fraser's been saying."

Timely, is what Norm did not like?

And the reporters - Steller reports:

The reporters, Tony Kennedy and Paul McEnroe, shot back that they had repeatedly sought an interview with Coleman on the subject. When the campaign rebuffed those requests, Kennedy and McEnroe warned Coleman they intended to raise the issue at his Oct. 29 campaign stop in St. Cloud.

Video clips showing the reporters shouting questions to an unresponsive Coleman as he gets into a waiting car immediately appeared on the Web and soon were featured in a DFL Party TV ad.

When asked at the editorial board interview yesterday about the charges in a Texas civil lawsuit that Kazeminy ordered executives at Deep Marine Technology to send $100,000 to the St. Paul insurance firm where Coleman’s wife works, Coleman turned the question against the newspaper [...]

Put Norm on ice skates and he could spin faster than Kristi Yamaguchi.

The New Ramsey City Council.

Faced with problematic situations, the Council has made two major decisions and has changed board and commission makeup, sometimes with perhaps too little directness as to compelling vs. minor motivations. Faced with no problematic situation the Council has given in to carping by a few, and done something impacting wetland buffering, which in turn impacts quality of water ultimately reaching the aquifer we in Ramsey on private wells drink from.

The big ticket items - prioritizing the Armstrong Blvd. rerouting and interchange, and buying the baby in the basket left on the doorstep, the failed Ramsey Town Center. Asking yet another time for a NorthStar stop was done, but I do not see that as major.

One can disagree with the choices made, as I do vigorously, with the environmental decision-making. But as to the other choices, some decision needed to be made on Armstrong and the RTC, and one was made in each instance, like it or love it.

On those two issues, depending on developments and interests that arise, as to interesting thinking or tangible interests - propritary acquisitions and promotions - time will test the Council's wisdom. Said a different way, they've a two-year window until the next election cycle, and then only three of seven seats will be on the line.

The third water tower - that's semi-major as a decision, and I would have gone the other way, putting the thing off. And not mere lip service in saying "No" but something more vigorous and lasting. Saving money, seeing how the housing market changes over the months to come, being the argument grounded on caution and conservative approach.

However -- It's their job, not mine. I as a citizen can observe and comment. But basically they have two years in which to be judged and something more premature than that could be off the mark.

_______UPDATE_______
Review and change of consulting arrangements is also something I would have examined were I in their place. I do not know if that reexaminaiton is going on or not. As with the boards and commissions, arguments can always be made for fresh faces and fresh approaches. Consultants cost money, and cost-benefit attention is always proper.

Is this a sign the commercial real estate collapse is beginning?

PiPress, carrying an AP feed:

Mall operator files for bankruptcy protection
By ALEX VEIGA AP Real Estate Writer
Updated: 04/16/2009 05:02:01 PM CDT
In its drive to become the second-largest owner of shopping malls in the nation, General Growth Properties Inc. racked up $27 billion in debt. At around 2 a.m. in Chicago on Thursday morning, the retail giant buckled under the weight.

After months of tense negotiations with tightfisted lenders, General Growth filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in a bid to protect its 200-plus shopping malls including the Glendale Galleria in Southern California and the South Street Seaport in Manhattan.

The company's properties include Mayfair Mall in Wauwatosa, the Fox River Mall in Appleton and Oakwood Mall in Eau Claire.

The Chicago-based company is paying the price for its aggressive expansion at the height of the real estate boom, when cheap lending proved an irresistible option for bankrolling prime acquisitions, such as its 2004 purchase of the Rouse Co.

The deal gave General Growth retail gems such as Faneuil Hall in Boston, the Providence Place mall in Rhode Island and the Harborplace waterfront marketplace in Baltimore, but at a hefty price: $7.2 billion plus $5.4 billion in assumed debt.

Rolling over financing for commercial properties is common in the industry, but when lenders all but stopped making loans last fall, it left General Growth without recourse to make its debt payments.

"While we have worked tirelessly in the past several months to address our maturing debts, the collapse of the credit markets has made it impossible for us to refinance maturing debt outside of Chapter 11," Chief Executive Adam Metz said in a statement.

By placing its fate in the hands of a bankruptcy judge, General Growth hopes to cast off its debt and emerge with its portfolio of landmark retail centers intact, although there are no guarantees the company will be able to do so.

"We will not have to sell substantial amounts of our iconic assets," Tom Nolan, president and chief operating officer, said during a conference call with reporters. "We believe we can maintain those."

But should General Growth have to sell-off even 10 percent of its shopping centers, that could depress overall mall property prices, said Chris Stanley, a research associate covering commercial real estate for Reis Inc.

"Mall owners are scared and don't really want this to happen, so I think (General Growth) will try to avoid that route as much as possible," he said.

Nolan acknowledged that the company took on significant amounts of debt to finance its expansion efforts, but stressed that the company didn't run into trouble trying to refinance until last fall.

It is a substantially longer article, so have a look.

Ramsey recently approved some kind of exploratory trip of city officials to try to round up restaurants for RTC. That's really a swim against a strong river current.

It seems an unlikely time for any success. The tiny commercial node Shingobee built, (anchored by the Coborn store), seems vulnerable, with the steady vacancy situation.

It is one property in a smaller set of more local ownership holdings (in comparison to the highly leveraged situation PiPress reported). On the web it's called "Northstar Marketplace," with the Ramsey site being one of several owned by Solomon Real Estate.

There's United Properties, as one of the bigger Twin Cities real estate holdings operations. How sound, right now, are United Properties and Solomon? Any reader with current links on Solomon, in particular, is asked to email or post a comment.

What's next? How big? Will it make the housing collapse look simple and minor by comparison? Will it be only a hiccup, troubling, non-fatal?

______UPDATE______
For those liking nostalgia, RTC groundbreaking was Number 6, in the ABC-Anoka County Union's top ten stories in 2003, here.

Actually, I am unclear, whether Solomon Real Estate Group is in ownership, or is a main agent for the owning interest, at the RTC retail node. This Google and this link might help any reader wanting to see more.