SUNW moves to JAVA
August 24, 2007 11:16 am SunRed Hat’s reaction was to move to NYSE in response to the volatility of the NASDAQ. Sun changes brand. A while ago, Jonathan talked at an internal Solaris all hands where he talked about leadership, characterizing it under a single word, courage – courage to be honest and integral, courage to be innovative, courage to collaborate and courage to act with pace and react to market needs. Of course time will tell on whether this will be a successful move, but either way, I’m satisfied that Jonathan practices what he preaches and I’m massively supportive of that and his continuing leadership.
August 24th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
But Java is less significant to Sun than it used to be, and its use is not growing. It’s just a language, one of many, and it hasn’t lived up to its original promise.
This feels like a McNealy move, not a Schwartz move. McNealy was always giving speeches about how the whole world should drop what they are doing and jump on whatever bandwagon Sun’s selling this month, whether it’s the Sparc architecture, Java, or whatever.
Fortunately for Sun, although this is a mistake, it’s not a very important one. It will annoy people and confuse the investors for a day, and microscopically depress the share price as small investors wind up buying one of the other Suns, e.g. Sunoco, by mistake. But in the long run, people don’t pay a great deal of attention to stock ticker symbols. A year from now, you’ll change it again, and people will poke fun at you.
August 24th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Funny enough, I have been running Sun hardware and Solaris for many years now. And have never run a Java app or server in production that entire time. Personally I think it is dumb and distracting.
August 24th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
This isn’t courage, this is a CEO making his mark on a company before moving on. Courage was opening Solaris, courage was opening Java, courage was grabbing hold of Opteron. Changing a stock ticker isn’t courage, it’s just setting fire to a brand that everyone knew since the early 80s and replacing it was something that belongs in a mug.
August 24th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
[…] Followup: at least someone likes the idea. […]
August 25th, 2007 at 12:49 am
It’s a terrible idea and a waste of money when the company is facing yet *more* layoffs– most people at Sun have no interest or use for Java in their jobs. So while it’s only a ticker name, it’s one that suggests that Java is central to Sun’s business, which is basically just a marketing lie.
August 25th, 2007 at 3:03 am
Changing a ticker symbol? How about solving some real problems like your hopeless packaging? I’m hoping Mr Murdoch gets things done because this is an awful mess right now.
Never run java? I wish. Wait until you want to use the new patch utilities. Update connection? More like update hell. Even if you just WANT to use the CLI smpatch utility you HAVE to download and install half of creation along with java or you can’t even register! Bloody stupid.
Solaris 10 is a great OS release. One of the best I’ve ever seen from any company. The Sun HW is excellent. So what can Sun do with it? Lets piss off our customers by making them load a lot of crap so they can be part of an SPS agreement that will save them money on maintenance but put so many bureaucratic jumps in the way that they want to kill something.
Lets see I have to register the SAME system 3 times!!!!! Once for update connection to get patches, once for sun explorer and once through a middleware piece of crap called CST. This is 2 more registrations than I should have to do.
August 25th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
I think changing the ticker symbol is a good thing. Imho Java is more important than FUD is suggesting above. Lots of multi-core multi-threaded processors out there, and they’re going to need a good multi-threaded language/platform in order for developers to get the best out of those chips. Now let’s see, we need a mature multi-threaded language, with a fantastic set of developer tools and industry wide-support – sounds like Java to me.