Microsoft Behind SCO Cash Investment? 395
An anonymous reader writes "eWEEK has got a story up suggesting Microsoft may be behind yesterday's $50mil cash investment in SCO. 'As an investment firm, BayStar leads, creates and participates in a number of PIPEs (Private Investments in Public Equity). Many of these deals involve investment money from other companies, including Microsoft.'"
Love letter from Bill Gates to McBride (Score:1, Insightful)
can spread fud and make windoze look good.
If you can confuse the market then I hope windoze 2003 will get some deployment.
Let me do to you all nite long McBride.
Not likely MS (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead, it has to be some group that is trying hide their involvement. There is no way that Baystar simply invested into SCO. Instead, it is a group that is trying to pump/dump or needs to hide its' involvment due to probable repercussions.
My guess is that it is either Canopy or Sun.
And BayStar Capital (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at it this way. Anyone with a brain knows that this $50M is not an investment, because an investment expects a return on investment. You may be able to find a few nutso small time investors who believe every press release they see and buy stock just in case, but those people generally don't have $50M.
The only other reason to spend $50M is to get product in return. All SCO has to offer is its lawsuits against Linux. Now think, who would have use for such a product? So far, two license buyers have shown up, Sun and Microsoft. Sun has already been certified as being immune to the SCO infringement claims. Microsoft just dumped another $8M into SCO for an enhanced license, which is just as useless to them as the previous license purchase.
There may be no proof that Microsoft is behind the $50M, but it looks like a pretty good first approximation.
Re:And BayStar Capital (Score:4, Insightful)
That they found an even bigger bunch of idiots. And if those idiots can sell up 60%, then they'll have found an even bigger bunch of idiots. It would be great to be in one of the earlier groups, sure, but there's just too much of a risk that the stock will be in your hands when nobody else will want to play, and then you'll be stuck with a crashed stock in an insolvent company as your "Biggest Idiot" prize.
If you want more details, I suggest researching a recent event known as the "dot com bust", which you appear to have managed to sleep through.
Re:I KNEW IT!! (Score:2, Insightful)
although in general, it makes much more sense
to think that Microsoft has good reasons to
attack Linux and the GPL.
Life is full of conspiracies, even when it does
not involve Billions of dollars. Look at your
life, how many consipiracies have you attempted
against others? I would say, we conspire
against one another all the time. An infinite
number of times.
Re:Another biased Slashdot article (Score:4, Insightful)
But BayStar's McGrath again stressed that Microsoft was not an investor in this deal. But he did point out that the fact that Microsoft had done business with SCO was seen as a positive when BayStar was looking at SCO as a potential good business and good investment.
Let's see... zero sales revenue/growth/planning, an entire profit projection based SOLELY on a rather speculative lawsuit based itself on evidence the plaintiff refuses to divulge, but oh yeah, Microsoft immediately bought one of their licenses (and to date is one of only two or three who have) so it must be a good business investment. Never mind that Microsoft is one of the larger players in Baystar's portfolios.
You may be Overly Critical Guy, but you are frequently more like Underly Logical Guy.
Drug dealers and terrorists aren't the only people who "launder" money.. This certainly continues to smell like a Microsoft circus act.
Someone just turnin' a buck on the carnage... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm actually happy to see someone other than SCO's board and management stands to profit from their hyper-inflated stock price. If I only had $50 million, and had thought of it first.
Re:Get out the tinfoil hats kids... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is an instance where a seemingly stupid move is made by people who would be expected to know better. And it's important for us to understand what's going on. And the information is scant, but the hints are disturbing. So of *course* conspiracy theories are going to flourish. In similar cases it has often turned out to be true that one of the theories was correct. You use theories to direct your search for more specific information. They ony become dangerous when you start believing in them before getting the "convincing information". Unfortunately, things that are repeated often enough easily become convincing. (Think of thinking as being similar to a Google search.)
But we probably need to resign ourselves to not getting hard information about the reasons here. It seems reasonable to assume "enemy action", but being more specific is probably premature certainty. For now, however, spinning theories to direct research is probably reasonable...
Occam's Razor (Score:3, Insightful)
There's your answer.