The Poster Child for Dead Companies Walking?

I got a lot of angry comments for that suggestion. And yet, here we are, six years later -- and as I listen to speeches on the vital importance to our stalled economy of fast-moving, dynamic young start-up companies, I read on my computer that Sun was preparing to lay-off 6,000 more employees -- 18 percent of the company -- and that it's stock value was now less than the total value of the cash and investments on its balance sheet. The latter number is usually a trigger for a quick acquisition by one of a host of suitors ... but beyond a few wistful suggestions in the press that Apple might once again want to buy Sun (as if!) like it did years ago, no one seemed interested. Apparently, Sun Microsystems is now worth less than the sum of its assets. If the company was a stock option, it would be underwater.

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So, I'll ask the question again, a half-decade later: What is the purpose of a company like this? Why does it stay in existence? Other than providing salaries for 30,000 employees (who would have likely found much better jobs over the last few years in a booming Silicon Valley) what contribution has this once-great company made in the 21st Century?

Sun Microsystems is just the high-tech poster child for dead-man-walking corporations. Our economy is littered with them (though, happily, they probably number far fewer than in Europe), and they exert a tremendous, though rarely recognized, drag on our economy.

And that drag becomes even greater when we try to save them -- or worse, bail them out. Surely there is a better way to put obsolete companies out of business rather than slowly wither away, tying up financial, intellectual and labor capital for years in the process.

Perhaps what we need is some kind of formal liquidation event -- think of it as assisted suicide for companies in extremis -- by which they can easily distribute their assets to all stakeholders, shut their doors and hold a big, drunken "gone out of business" party. Then, those assets could be recirculated back into the economy to, in part, serve as investment capital for new start-up companies -- just as the employees would be returned to the labor pool, many of them bringing their experience to help run those start-ups.