The Economist asks the question: Mister McNealy,is your company toast?

Being heavily involved with Sun products, I must say that the quality control is lacking these days, and the muddled middleware inititative is a bit taxing. In fact, I have all sorts of gripes about Sun, not least of which is I had to dump their stock for a loss last year. However, I don’t see much of a decent alternative for corporate users.

Solaris is, without question, the most mature, stable and robust operating system available upon which to build web-enabled applications and “middleware.” Sun hardware is firmly entrenched in every data center I’ve ever seen, and continues to be the vendor of choice for more large companies than any other. The middleware softare on Sun is top notch, state-of-the-art type stuff. Unfortunately for Sun, most of it doesn’t come from Sun. And J2EE is the mack daddy.

.NET could make inroads. It’s the right idea—but in Microsoft’s hands, I fear the worst. Whatever happened to Cisco’s UNIX port of Active Directory? You see, Microsoft promises the moon and interoperable next-generation functionality, but almost always stumbles due to its paranoid and closed nature.