Sun's Trading Symbol Going From SUNW To JAVA

Mortimer.CA writes "Straight from Jonathan Schwartz's weblog, Sun is changing their ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA: 'JAVA is a technology whose value is near infinite to the internet, and a brand that's inseparably a part of Sun (and our profitability). [...] To be very clear, this isn't about changing the company name or focus — we are Sun, we are a systems company, and we will always be a derivative of the students that created us, Stanford University Network is here to stay. But we are no longer simply a workstation company, nor a company whose products can be limited by one category — and Java does a better job of capturing exactly that sentiment than any other four letter symbol.'"

Re:Uhm.

[MMC Monster]

Actually, I was under the impression that SUNW was a more respectable name. Workstation gives the suggestion of serious computer power.

Wait a sec....

[Churla]

So they don't want to just be associated with workstations, so they change their symbol to the name of one particular software product they produce. I boggle at this.

Why not change the symbol to something like SunS (Sun Systems, oops taken), or SunT (...technologies) , or Sunn (...networking, but also taken...)

You get the idea. Keep the identity they have as Sun, because that does carry recognition. Far more than I think they think Java does. It would be like MS changing their ticker to WNDZ or the federal government getting the ticker symbol DCMA...

Re:Uhm.

[ednopantz]

This is the platform company that spent the 1990s evangelizing a language that makes it easy to write platform independent code.

Java may be nice, but it was a butt-stupid move for a company that made its money in OSes and hardware.

Well JAVA did make a pile of money ...

[supersnail]

... only trouble is it made it for IBM not sun!

IBM seem to be the only company capable of actually selling java based product.
But then again they persuaded people to part with ready cash for Lotus Notes
so it doesnt really say much about Java.

I think SUN is desperate not to be seen a a hardware manufacturer becuase
of its associantion with commodity products and declining profitability.

However the only way to become a succesful software business is to SELL
software to customers, which, SUN does not do at all well.
 

Re:Not sure if this is a good idea

[squoozer]

I thought at least some of the life around under sea thermal vents was powered by the hear from the earths core which, if I'm not mistaken, comes primarily from radioactive decay deep within the Earth and has nothing to do with the sun. The radioactive material did come from a star though so you could argue that all (known) life derives it's energy from stars in one way or another.

"Java" is better than "SunW"? Maybe not.

[Futurepower(R)]

Quote: "I don't think Java is a particularly big reason for people to like Sun, and tying your company's future to it seems ill-advised."

Exactly. The name change is evidence that Sun has some very technically ignorant marketing people, apparently, or maybe just a very technically ignorant, but imperial, CEO.

My understanding is that Sun does not allow its own programmers to use Java for important programs because Java is bytecode interpreted, not compiled. That makes Java easy to de-compile. Sun apparently designed the language for other people to use. Microsoft did the same with C#; apparently none of the programs Microsoft sells are written in C#.

Examples of Java de-compilers:
Jad - the fast JAva Decompiler [kpdus.com]
DJ Java Decompiler [fortunecity.com]
Jode [sourceforge.net]
JReversePro [sourceforge.net]
SourceTec Java Decompiler [sothink.com]

From Wikipedia's Criticism of Java [wikipedia.org]: "The look and feel of GUI applications written in Java using the Swing platform is often different from native applications." It seems to me that the average person's experience of Java is that programs written in it are slow and funky, not a good advertisement for a large company.

Eventually, Java will be completely open source. It is not now. Once it is open source, Sun loses control. Does Sun want to lose control of a symbol it is using for its company?

Java [wikipedia.org] is an Indonesian island of 124 million, the most populous island in the world and one of the most densely populated regions on Earth. There have been political problems there in the past. If there are problems there in the future, the word Java will be in the news. More than 90 percent of Javanese are Muslims. Does Sun intend to involve the company with the uncertain future of a Muslim island?

I will now quote someone who considers himself an authority, the CEO of Sun: "Granted, lots of folks on Wall Street know SUNW, given its status as among the most highly traded stocks in the world (the SUNW symbol shows up daily in the listings of most highly traded securities)." -- From the August 23, 2007 badly formatted article linked by Slashdot, Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog: The Rise of JAVA - The Retirement of SUNW [sun.com], written by Sun CEO Jonathan Swartz [sun.com].

Mr. Swartz, are you an imperial CEO like Gerald Levin [wikipedia.org] of AOL Time Warner? (Time Warner's merging itself into AOL is considered the worst business decision of all time. The company immediately lost $88 Billion.) Mr. Levin called himself an "imperial CEO", meaning that he made decisions without consulting other people.

Mr. Swartz, if you don't have enough technical knowledge even to format your own web page, are you technically knowledgeable enough to run Sun? From the biography on Sun's web site: "Schwartz received degrees in economics and mathematics from Wesleyan University."

I don't believe it will actually happen, but if it does, by changing away from the strong brand of SUNW, known for serious servers, to a brand largely outside its control, Sun will weaken its position in the marketplace, in my opinion.

I don't think it is wise for technically knowledgeable people to work for companies managed by people with little or no technical knowledge. When technically ignorant managers try to run technically-oriented companies, a lot of unpredictable, weird things happen. Why take the risk?

Linux

[Rocketship Underpant]

I humbly suggest 'RTFM' for any of the big Linux vendors. :)

Re:Not sure if this is a good idea

[chuck]

Interestingly, the New York Stock Exchange has reserved the stock symbol M for Microsoft, if they ever jump ship from Nasdaq.

http://invest-faq.com/articles/triv-one-letter-tic k.html [invest-faq.com]

Re:Unfathomable.

[cmat]

Ya know, something I've always found bizarre about this "everyone thinks java has poor loading times" comment... most everyone that uses a computer and is not a programmer seems to look at the slow loading of any app as a "problem with my computer, hang on a sec, it's just loading now". So most of the time I would argue that the average user of such applications care more about overall performance slowdowns and almost never associate the real causes of slowdown to any particular factor.

Sun is hitching their cart to a dead horse

[Anonymous Coward]

Java had promise, when almost everything was going to run it, from Javastations for thin clients to embedded Java and JINI.

However, Java is highly fragmented. Your code may work perfectly under one JVM on one OS platform, but go from IBM's to Sun's, and random glitches happen. For example, you have no clue if your JCE crypto is full bits (128/256), 48 bits, or even zero bits during the time when France required no cryptography by law.

Sadly, in my experience, the best Java compiler for getting projects to work for classes was the now discontinued Microsoft's J#, and moving the Java code to .NET, where it will work without issue (unfortunately only on Windows machines) compared to the piss-poor state of "guess the JVM" with native Java. With JVMs the state they are now, I compile code on my Linux box, executables made there will throw random exceptions on Windows and vice versa, even with JVMs the same version.

Of course, there is always the biggest problem with Java, and that's performance clientside (or the miserable lack of.) Even Microsoft got it right with .NET.

Sun needs to do something, or else even Adobe may be dropping a boot to their head with Flex when it gets out of beta and gets into mainstream.