SUNW To Become JAVA

This is about the dumbest thing I've heard. Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems explains on his blog that Sun is changing their NASDAQ trading symbol from SUNW to JAVA. "But there's no doubt in my mind more people know Java than Sun Microsystems. There's similarly no doubt they know Java more than nearly any other brand on the internet."

Oddly they are not changing the name of the company, just the trading symbol. Apple changed their name recently, dropping the word "Computer" to show the new focus of the company on consumer products. Sun isn't doing that. "To be very clear, this isn't about changing the company name or focus - we are Sun, we are a systems company." So they're just changing the ticker symbol. If you knew you wanted to buy Sun stock would you think to look under JAVA? If you think that brand is so important change the name of the company.

And I still don't see how Sun makes much money on Java. They at least used to get money from licensing the J2EE brand to fewer and fewer vendors and probably J2ME as well. This might have changed with the recent open sourcing of Java but I can't imagine it's a lot of money. In Schwartz's post he describes students using it and consumers seeing the brand, but conspicuously no revenue sources. One comment in the blog I think got it right, maybe the board will realize that the CEO is out of ideas.