Sun Should Have Picked SLRS, Not JAVA

Published: August 30, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The unofficial end to summer is the Labor Day holiday, and the official end is September 23, the autumnal equinox. Which means the silly season, when the news is generally weird, both inside the IT racket and outside in the world at large, is still in full swing. Hence, Sun's decision to change its stock ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA on the Nasdaq exchange last week.

That this is news at all just shows you how boring it is out there in IT land. But the change also shows that Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and chief executive officer, has taken over from founder Scott McNealy, who is still Sun's chairman, in making decisions. It also shows that sometimes, vendors try to make something true that is not really true by saying it over and over again. This works in politics, so maybe it will work in IT, right?

McNealy was the sales and business brains of the original Stanford University Network Workstation business, what eventually became known as Sun Microsystems. He is a hardware and operating system guy at heart, and a hard-hitting, straight-talking wiseguy. Schwartz is more subtle, and he is clearly coming from the software side--specifically application development. So it comes as no surprise that Schwartz--if this was indeed his idea--would change Sun's moniker on the stock ticker from SUNW to JAVA. Schwartz has no personal connection to Sun's history as a hardware supplier with extraordinarily good engineering on both hardware and software--at least not the kind of connection that McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim (Sun's past and current chief technology officer), and Bill Joy (also a past CTO and now a venture capitalist) had to hardware and operating systems. Bechtolsheim and Joy invented the stuff that the rest of us talk about. Schwartz started out at McKinsey & Co, which unquestionably has some of the brightest people in the world analyzing all manner of things, and came to Sun through an acquisition and shot up the corporate ladder in under a decade. He is polished, knowledgeable, calm, and sarcastic. He is also wrong on this one.

If Sun wanted to be really honest about what it is as seen through a stock ticker symbol, it would perhaps pick SLRS. Short, obviously, for Solaris. Because in all honesty, while the Sun Microsystems name has been made famous by its association with the Java programming environment it created by virtualizing C++, the real money has always come and, perhaps, will always come from Solaris. Sun is reported to make well north of $1 billion in sales on Solaris licenses and support. All of its servers, with a few exceptions for the few Linux and Windows boxes, can be attributed to Solaris. The StorageTek tape archive business has very little connection to Solaris, but then again, it also has very little connection to Sun itself. Buying StorageTek for $4.1 billion was a way to get a storage sales force and a different kind of enterprise customer base. No more, no less. While many (if not all) of Sun's software products--middleware, development tools, and so forth--use Java technology, they are mostly used on Solaris, although increasingly on non-Sun platforms. This is good, by the way.

But the fact remains, Sun is the company that sells the stuff that Solaris runs best on and provides the enterprise-class support for Solaris and related hardware, and that is the main reason why companies continue to spend money with Sun. And Solaris will be the basis of Sun's economic future, not Java, no matter how many times or how convincingly Schwartz or other Sun employees say otherwise.