index.html Journal Index file More of my Rants I have a blog on Google's free blog site. Try the link below. http://brucesalem.blogspot.com My Blog on Google George Sorros on "The Crash of 2008" I feel vindicated by the comments in this book by someone who has a provem track record in investing and finance which says that the Conservatives pushed "Market Fundementalism" which is basically the view that economics can be scientific; that Markets work like physical processes and seek equilibrium. Soros believes this is fundementally wrong that the observers interfere with the observed creating unpredictable conditions that lead to market bubbles and financial crashes. He squarely blames the Bush administration just ended for mismanaging the financial regulatory responsibility and traces the myth of Market Fundementalism back to Ronald Regan in the current "Super-Bubble". Valuation, it would appear is not objective, accounted, but in large part a function of the investor psychology which "crashes" when the meme is changed under collective preception dislocation. This is a far from equillibrium situation brought on by the tendancy of purdance and accountability to lag behind dreams. Economics is them another social science in which perception is reality, and where we expect people who are spending other people's money to be predant and careful, but they get caught up in a web of lies and dreams that eventually come crashing down. Oracle is buying Sun Microsystems Inc. The Recesion has claimed the company I used to work for, and I guess Sun deserves to be taken over by Larry Ellison and Oracle. I guess that Oracle wants the hardware platform that Sun owns and maybe MySQL as well. I am at a loss to see the real value to Oracle, with its yoeman RDBMS and fairly conservative approach, of Sun. Surely thousands more Sun employees will get the ax. Too bad. Maybe the reason Sun has lost its way goes back to the very fact that its chief founder, Scott McNealy, went to Stanford Business School and was not primarily a hardware or Operating System person. He tended to bring in management and financial types to make the strategic decisions for the company. This is why it failed. When I was there I felt continually jerked around, like the management changed its mind every other day, and the marketing both to customers and to employees seemed muddled and confused, The company was going in twenty directions at once and eventually ending up with no core focus or identity. I think that the reason for this was that Sun's managment were listening too closely to Wall-Street. Compare and contrast Sun with Apple in the same period, 1990-present. John Scully, the marketing guy from Coke, almost drove Apple into oblivian, but when Steve Jobs came back to apple from Next, not only did Apple wow everybody with the iPod, iPhone, and lots of new machines, but Jobs rejuvinated Mac OS with darwin (bsd-unix) and enabled Apple to take advantage of Open Source and once Jobs sunbbed IBM's power-PC for Intel he closed the deal into Microsoft's face running Windows and Linux on Mac OS, the best of all OS worlds. Sun, on the other hand missed the boat over and over again listing to its corporate customers and Wall-Street. It couldn't let Sparc die even though it was killed by Intel and it faltered on Intel-support at a time when it could have reentered the PC market. Sun could have done what Apple did, but it lacked the vision. I remember back in 1977-82 that I couldn't persuade the idiot I worked for at USGS that UNIX was the OS of the future. He was a Mac user, and although he may be retired or even dead by now, isn't it ironic that if he bought a Mac anytime in the past few years it would be based on UNIX. Much needs to be said for my lack of negotiating and people skills, but it is hell to see the truth long before everybody else.