So I guess it was in the news very recently that Sun Microsystems is changing its ticker symbol to JAVA. The company who was the dot in dotcom, and has, for probably over a decade, had the slogan “the network is the computer”, is now going to heavily brand itself with what it believes to be its strongest asset: Java

I have been a Sun user and even somewhat of a fan of Sun products for a long time. I even, at one point, obtained some Sun certifications. When I was plying OSery as my means of swinging the digital hammer a few years back, I came to the conclusion that—at least in the nebulous concept defined as “The Enterprise”—Sun had the best integrated hardware, operating system and software offerings on the market. IBM was close, but something about the elegance Solaris really struck me over AIX. It was almost like Mac over Windows in my mind. Sun just had a more intuitive, beautiful offering.

That is not to say I didn’t have my problems with sun. Their support organization was a pain in my ass. I heard “out of scope” and “not supported” so much from them that one would think they thought they were consultants. My company standardized on a Sun stack for J2EE apps with Oracle on the back end in preparation for a huge Superbowl launch of a product. Of course, the whole thing began to smoke and smell like rotting corpses. I’m pretty sure I saw a bloody, rotting piece of meat coming out of an expansion slot on one of our many E10Ks.

The whole thing was such a fiasco, that we had to station numerous highly-paid application, system and network experts around-the-clock just to restart the services when they’d crash. Eventually, a few people worked insane hours, pulled it out of the ditch, and fixed all of the issues in Sun’s buggy documentation and software. I even remember at one point, when our team pointed out something they had to do to get the damned stuff to work, Sun’s support staff told us that configuration wasn’t supported. Really? The one that works is not supported? Oh, and one of the people on our team was from Sun Services. So here we have a situation where the support org is telling the service org that by fixing the product, they’ve brought it into an unsupported state.

We finally got this all working really well, I’d say, when we went to BEA products. And now BEA is on the verge of being de-listed.

Why did I like Sun again?

The company has always seemed all over the map. They recklessly and frequently plunged into markets and niches where they had no compelling product. Sun workstations? In 1993—sure. In 2001? Are you joking? What happened with that Cobolt acquisition? Seems like they’re still all over the map. In his blog, the current CEO, Jonathan Schwarz, it going on and on about the two strongest brands they have, OpenOffice (what?) and Java:

had dinner with a financial analyst a few months ago who said he saw the Java launch experience “a few times a day” when accessing intranet applications – as did tens of thousands of his fellow employees.

Y’all know that experience, right? This amazingly valuable branding experience he’s talking about, right? The one where your computer grinds to a halt, all of your browser windows freeze up. That’s the one. The one that makes you feel just like the first time you cranked up a Java applet and you thought, “shit, this is it?” Well, it hasn’t changed much since then, and you can still shudder each time you see it. Now that’s branding!

And don’t even get me started with OpenOffice. I’m sure it’s fine, but, seriously, My Pretty Pony is dreaming if he thinks people know anything about it. What’s more, I think the user experience is about the same as it is with Java: crappy. So OpenOffice is coming to the already-getting-annoying Google toolbar. My prediction, to quote Mister T as Clubber Lang: pain. I’m already a bit pissed at Google Desktop/Toolbar, for it has transformed the one saving grace of my work-bound Windows-user life (I’m proudly all Mac at home) into something I’m on the verge of running the dreaded “Add/Remove Programs” against. Google Desktop slows down my computer and is always pestering me for updates. Picassa shows up in my system tray and I can’t figure out how to make it not do it. This wouldn’t be such a big deal, but this is a work computer on which I give presentations in (shudder) Powerpoint from time-to-time. My little badge of unauthorized software should go away when I want it to!

So Sun is jettisoning the history of Solaris, the OS that, alongside Linux, powered virtually all of the internet at one point. No longer is the network the thing, but some bloated little virtual machine with some libraries and a decade of decay and design-by-committee in its core. The iPhone just dropped, with no Java at all, and, so far, the reviews of the user experience have been phenomenal. My sister, having just purchased her iPhone, did something she’s never been able to do before: reply to an SMS. She can work all of the functions with no manual and no geek brother around to show her how to do it. I think it’s basically the beginning of the end for Java, and Sun’s embracing it. Like hugging a boulder that is about to roll off a cliff.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball sums it up pretty nicely:

It’s just the stock symbol, but it strikes me as so wrong, almost defeatist, to make any sort of branding statement that suggests that you believe one of your products is bigger than the company itself. It’d be like if Apple had changed its symbol to “MAC” or “IPOD”. Foolish.

...Apparently they couldn’t find a four-character symbol that stood for “shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic”. (SDCT?)

So I still like Sun. I even hold a trivially small position in its shares out of nostalgia. I think the brokerage account I hold them in would charge me more in fees to sell them than they are worth, so I hold them with no illusion that they’d ever recover. I’d request the certificates to hang on my wall, but that costs $25.00—probably about what the shares are worth. But I do hope Sun can pull it out of the ditch.

I think it’s vital that we all root for its success—especially in the Java space. At present, there’s no serious competition to the steamroller that is Microsoft .NET. You know how everyone was chortling about the delay between XP and Vista and wondering what exactly it was that Microsoft was doing? I’ll tell you what they were doing. They were flying IT architects, CIOs, mid-level IT managers and anyone who wanted a free trip to Seattle and had anything to do with IT around, wining them, dining them, and then getting them to agree to at least try using BizTalk and Sharepoint for greatly reduced license costs. They were explaining to these people that the company they worked for had an antiquated security model based on firewalls and least privilege when, in fact, they should flatten their networks and turn on IPSec—a much more Microsoft-friendly way of doing business. They showed off the Windows Update infrastructure—a huge farm of systems sitting on the internet with no firewall in front of them.

The bait worked. Now, as we speak, the heart of your corporations IT infrastructure—previously where Sun, IBM, HP and a few others cut each other to shreds in competition—now has a little bit of Microsoft in it. And we all know that where there’s a little bit of Microsoft, there’s about to be a lot more.

If Java and J2EE goes belly up without a viable replacement, the game is over. IBM will gladly sell the company a bunch of X86 servers to run Longhorn, but the *NIXes are kaput.