By now, you may have heard about the prank post we published on April Fool’s Day about Sun acquiring Parallels for $ 205 million. While the story was obviously fake, many people started speculating about its authenticity and – which was far more interesting – about the possibility of Parallels ever selling, and if so, at what price?
We were amused about the comments about it being ‘not so funny’, which was never the intention anyway. It wasn’t a joke, people, it was an April Fool. If it mislead you for even a second, that means it worked. It wasn’t supposed to make you laugh out loud, it was meant to get you thinking. We loved the response!
Honestly, did it?
Evidently, we didn’t want the prank to be a lame one, so we decided to run a story that would make people stop and think rather than being obviously fake, which is exactly what happened. As far as we’re concerned, it worked. We even got some feedback from both Sun and Parallels employees about the story, about how much they got a good laugh out of it. We loved reading the retaliatory post on the Parallels Consumer Tech blog, too.
Not exactly something to start a lawsuit over, or something that would actually affect the stock market, like some blogger ignorantly suggested (we hope he was joking too, because otherwise it would almost seem envious).
Anyway, official statements from parties mentionned in the article contained exactly the type of comment that official statements would have to feature: “Parallels is not for sale“, “Parallels is worth much more“, etc. (don’t you just love how these two kinda contradict each other?).
To be fair, we think Parallels is worth much more than $ 205 million as well, we weren’t trying to make a statement by picking that price, we just kinda went for it after thinking about it for a second or two. Same for the acquirer, we went for Sun after reading somewhere that Parallels would have been a great acquisition for Sun about 2 years ago, before it got so big.
Some of the points raised in the blog post by Ilya Baimetov, Directory of Technology at Parallels, are more interesting than the discussion about a good acquisition price, though. He says:
“SUN is a really strange acquirer. Our products are for Windows, Mac and Linux, and SUN is not that focused on the first two. Also, SUN is really not that much into automation, so again, not a good fit. If Microsoft or VMware or even HP or IBM was mentioned – it would make some sense, but not SUN.”
Excellent way to say you’re not for sale, guys! 😉
Now can we move on?
[…] Update 3: check out our follow-up post […]