Paul Murphy has written a blog entry entitled Microsoft to buy Red Hat? Say it ain’t so. Ignoring the blatent speculation in that post, there are so many factual errors and obvious mistakes in the analysis that it appears he knows absolutly nothing about what he is talking about.

Consider this gem:

The biggest threat Red Hat faces right now is that IBM could settle with SCO and then release its own Linux along with workstations and servers based on the Cell processor.

Consider the way the SCO case is currently positioned. It looks like IBM will win, probably be awarded damages and SCO will probably be delisted and (I suspect) wound up as a company since their entire business model rest on winning that case. Why exactly would IBM consider settling the case now if they didn't earlier?

Then there is this:

With SuSe essentially out of the picture, Linspire in a world by itself, and Debian not getting the press it deserves, such a move by IBM would leave Red Hat with nowhere to go except a suicidal head-to-head competition with Microsoft in the x86 marketplace.Given that Cell outperforms x86 by an order of magnitude and doesn’t have the security weaknesses built into the x86, this would leave them fighting to hold an ever decreasing share of a shrinking market.

Geeze – Intel & AMD had better give up now! They have no hope against the magic of the Cell processor! Of course, there is the small problem of the Cell requiring entirely new programming techniques to get the best out of it – but I'm guessing Murphy didn't understand that.

Finally there is this bit of logic:

Getting acquired therefore makes sense as Red Hat’s Plan B -but Microsoft’s Plan B has traditionally been Plan A delayed a few years and I can see no reasonable business scenario under which the acquisition makes sense for them.

If I understand that bit of logic correctly, I think he's giving himself an excuse to use when Microsoft doesn't buy Red Hat. I think that might be the smartest bit of work he did in that piece…