Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW – News) today announced that it will change its Nasdaq stock ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA, the ubiquitous technology and brand it created in 1995. The stock ticker change will go into effect for the trading community on Monday, August 27, 2007.

Exactly what shareholder value does this create? Is it going to open the door to new sales opportunities? Are stock analysts going to upgrade Sun on the strength of this change?
And what is the opportunity cost of doing this? Even though it’s managed to squeeze out a series of small profits, Sun’s product revenue numbers are flat. I’m sure that over the last 12 months there have been several unsuccessful bids which Sun could have won by incremental product or support engineering – engineering that would have cost much less than this relabelling exercise.
So how does Jonathan explain it? In three sentences:

“The Java brand and technology have evolved to be among the most pervasive on the internet, yielding extraordinary awareness for Sun and opportunity for the community that leverages it,”

Technology? Absolutely. Java is the standard language for SOA engineering. It’s the Visual Basic of the server side. But brand? I don’t think so. The Internet has moved beyond branding technology; what’s important now is branding services and communities.
And has Java’s success yielded “extraordinary awareness for Sun”? Not obvious. Certainly among those who are aware of technology, Sun’s workstations, servers, and Solaris OS are at least as important as Java. Indeed Sun seems to think so too: recently I’ve see more Sun press releases about Solaris, multithread chips, “eco-computing”, and so forth than I have about Java.

“More than a billion people across the globe, representing nearly every demographic, market and industry, rely upon Java’s security, innovation and value to connect them with opportunity.”

Absolutely true, even if 99.99% of them have no idea whatsoever that they do so. That’s the power of infrastructure engineering.

“That awareness positions Sun, and now our investor base, for the future.”

Bzzzt! First this awareness is probably illusory. Second, how would such “awareness… position [the] investor base for the future”? This is simply silly. Investors care about the business proposition, performance against goals, financial reports, and the rate of return. None of this remotely justifies a rebranding exercise such as Jonathan is proposing.
Look here. I really, really wish Sun well. I’m a shareholder, I’ve got a lot of friends there, and I admire the way in which Sun continues to push the envelope on computing technology. The recent announcement about transactional memory is a great example of this. ZFS is fantastic, and Black Box is a great idea. I want Sun to win. But stunts like changing the stock ticker symbol are not going to persuade skeptical customers to buy. (In fact it’s a distraction: Sun salespeople are probably going to waste 10 minutes on every sales call explaining this nonsense, time that they should be spending on Niagara throughput or ZFS availability.)
P.S. I liked Kevin’s take on this.
P.P.S. I wonder how all those loyal Sun staff who have SUNW license plates feel about this…
P.P.P.S. Dave Johnson’s keeping score.

• The Sun Microsystems Alumni Association. [SMAA] A Yahoo! Group that puts you in touch with thousands of fellow Sun alumni, and also gives you access to a steady stream of Sun-relevant job postings.
• LinkedIn. Probably the most widely used professional networking tool right now. I find it to be an invaluable resource. For example, I’ve been using it to research each potential employer by identifying former Sun colleagues who work (or worked) there. If you’re a member of SMAA, you can join the corresponding LinkedIn group and use this logo in your profile:

Commiserations and best wishes to all involved. The good news is that the job market is pretty strong, and there’s high demand for the kind of skills that Sun folks have.
And good luck to the rest of you at Sun. Please make this RIF the last one!

Sun Microsystems hired a new software chief on Monday, CNET News.com has learned: Rich Green, the latest in a series of former executives the company has lured back
[…]
Green originally started at Sun in 1989 but left in 2004 to become executive vice president of product development at Cassatt, a start-up focusing on managing large groups of servers.
[…]
Green is one of several returning executives who Sun Chairman Scott McNealy likes to highlight as the company tries to argue that it has its dot-com mojo back. “We’ve got them coming back in droves–Andy Bechtolsheim and Mike Lehman and Peter Ulander and Karen Tegan,” McNealy said in an interview last week. “There’s a boomerang hitting my door, it seems, every five e-mails these days.”

Without commenting on the merits of individuals, I have to say that I’ve always been skeptical of this “bungee exec” pattern at Sun. Sometimes they simply return; sometimes Sun buys their start-up. The problem is, they are experienced denizens of the Sun echo-chamber, and history suggests that their sojourns away from Sun don’t change them very much. I would prefer to see Sun recruiting executive talent from companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, or SAP: people who could challenge the conventional wisdom. Because [insert deity here] knows, it needs challenging!