Combine poor market conditions, SUN's stock price free-falling, Microsoft's desire to break into the enterprise market and you can imagine this acquisition actually happening. The fact is there are some compelling arguments to buy SUN at this point. SUN is obviously in a bit of trouble right now, their market cap is currently less than their annual revenue. That is free money for an acquirer. Schwartz has bet the farm on a long term open source strategy and while I think this is bold and commendable, it is not well suited to the current climate; nervous shareholders need to see results before 2014. It's already likely SUN will spin off some parts of their business (read: hardware) to reduce the staggering amount of cash they are burning through, but that will only go so far, SUN may need to make more drastic changes.
If Microsoft took control of SUN I think we'd see some big changes across the board. Microsoft would inject some much needed shorter term strategy, and a lot of marketing muscle that SUN desperately needs. I think they would systematically lop off all the random projects that SUN don't make money from including Open Office. OpenSolaris, MySQL and SUN's virtualization platform would be safe.
Of course this would mean that Microsoft owned JAVA. That's a pretty alarming thought. I was on a panel a couple of days ago where I contested the value of open sourcing the JDK for the end user. However, with possibilities like this I stand corrected, open sourcing the JDK was the way to go. Even though Microsoft wouldn't screw with it, you can bet there would be a huge push back form the JAVA community. I chose Java 10 years ago to get away from Microsoft's wacky APIs and brainwashing (ironic really), I can't help be feel others like myself would be pretty uncomfortable with this.
The end result would be Microsoft having a credible enterprise story, with a business to back it up. they would also (to some degree) control the mind-share of two of the biggest developer communities, Java and .NET. There would bound to be objections from other vendors on monopolization, but since the market share and products of the two companies don't actually overlap too much these objections may be difficult to defend. Scary thought.