Oracle buys BEA Systems for $8.5 billion. Sun Microsoft Systems buys MySQL for about $1.0 billion. Gregory Reyes – Brocade’s ex-CEO – gets 21 months in jail for backdating stock options. What was it that Apple announced again yesterday?

Another big software company – BEA – is being consumed by Oracle today. While some people will say this goes back three months to the first offer Oracle made for BEA, the idea has been floating around for a long time. I quickly found a priceless article about it online in Linux World from 3/16/04 (republished on Java.net). Facing almost certain defeat in its pursuit of PeopleSoft, Oracle is eyeing other candidates and possibly BEA*. “Faced with a tough, if not losing, battle for PeopleSoft, Oracle executives said Thursday that they were considering other acquisitions… Henley (CFO, Chairman) said Oracle had been ‘looking at a variety of areas’ but didn’t identify any potential takeover targets. It has expressed interest in BEA as well as reserve over the price.*

My friend Dave sent me a hysterical Onion article titled Failure Now An Option*.* I hate the phrase “failure is not an option” – of course it is. Some choice quotes: “As failure continues to dominate the American landscape, this mantra must be overruled” “We have no choice but to revoke failure’s non-optional status, effective immediately,” “Now all citizens … will [be able to say] Fuck that – this isn’t worth it.” “The only difference is that now Americans can choose, without fear of being ostracized by society, to quit long before getting ahead.” And some data.

We recently made another Foundry Group investment in the Zynga Game Network. Brad Stone wrote a great article about Zynga in the NYTimes about it titled More Than Games, a Net to Snare Social Networkers. One of my co-investors – Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures – wrote a nice overview of how he came to make this investment. I vividly remember seeing my long time friend Mark Pincus’ name pop up as the author of Texas Hold’em on Facebook one day over the summer and thinking “hmmm – what’s Mark up to?” 

I know – blasphemy in Boulder to say anything negative about CROX. However, I’m just channeling Howard Lindzon, the founder of WallStrip and stock trader extraordinarre. I don’t know jack about trading in public markets so I just ignore them and let other people do it for me, but it’s fun to watch what guys like Howard write. In Crocs (CROX) – Case Study … Supply Trumps Demand Howard offers free advice to the management team of Crocs for how to get out of the ditch.

It’s always useful to put failure in perspective. While Citigroup is likely to announce a $20 billion writedown tomorrow, that’s difficult for most of us to relate to. However, I bet most people that have traveled in the US have had the privilege of having their bags misplaced on a trip through Denver International Airport. The original amazing DIA baggage system cost $300m. It never worked. The city eventually turned it over to United Airlines (the dominant carrier at DIA.) United Airlines stopped using it in 2005. It’ll now cost $9m to dismantle it and get rid of the scrap metal.

Now that I use 267 different social networking tools, I’m confused. I’ve got so many different “friends”, but I don’t know how to differentiate between them. My “friend” Dave Nolastnamesogoogledoesntindexme recently asked me if I have seen any moves toward private hierarchies of relationships. Specifically he (and I) want to categorize my “friends” into a hierarchy that I get to create. One example set might be (lover, buddy, friend, acquaintances, met once, jackass, enemy). This “friend set” should be user customizable and private.

Every day I get emails from people working on new startups. I’m continually amazed at how many of them come from their existing corporate email address. There are lots of quick reasons I can think of why this is a bad idea. Your company owns your email. Theoretically, everything you write in email is owned by your company. Your boss reads your email. Especially if you suddenly quit to start a new company. You use Microsoft Office and don’t know how to turn off auto-complete. C’mon – you’ve accidentally sent an email to someone you didn’t mean to because of auto-complete. It’s weird for me to get an email from joe@bigco saying “starting a new company” – it makes me think that you aren’t that serious. I could come up with lots more. It’s so simple to get a free gmail (or yahoo, or hotmail) email account. Be bold – take the plunge.

In my book review of Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, I said “This is a chewy and long but if you are looking for an exhaustive, comprehensively researched, and completely negative view of the history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes is the one for you.” Nicholas Dujmovic does not agree with me. In his book review on the CIA web site he systematically tears it apart after asserting that “Legacy of Ashes in not the definitive history of the CIA that it purports to be.”