I guess bid withdrawal is just a standard negotiation technique to piss the shareholders and force the board, like Yahoo/MS and I believe Oracle/BEA
Yeah, this whole situation reeks of the Yahoo/MS deal -- lots of testosterone and people leaking negotiation status to see what it does to the stock price. Ugly.
The difference, of course, is that IBM doesn't really need Sun, it just sees a good company at a good price, or it thought it did.
Why is this a difference? Does MS need Yahoo at any price?
That's 15 cents per share: millions of dollars.
To be more precise, Sun has 744.71M shares issued, and 0.15$ per share comes to 111.7 Million USD
$111.7M is way too small of a difference to kill this deal. Clearly, the issue is in the other terms. It seems likely that Sun wanted IBM to make a firm commitment right now and IBM wanted to reserve the right to back out for a while. Or, Sun has some kind of poison pill (besides its employees' hatred of IBM) that they weren't willing to drop. Or, maybe IBM wanted to be shielded from some liablities like support contracts for products they'd want to drop immediately. There's all kinds of reasons for which the deal could have fallen through, but $111.7M in price is not one.