Why does SUNW want to be JAVA?

Few CEOs have a sense of humour unless they're laughing at their own, highly predictable, barbs at the opposition, but Schwartz has a permagrin.

He also has that ponytail, which tells you he is free of vanity and has never let go of his inner dweeb. He was even good enough to laugh along when we wrote a story about the old Davy Crockett peripheral. In short, he's alright with us.

But this business of changing the company's stock ticker symbol to JAVA from SUNW is a bit comical.

In his estimable bog, Schwartz suggests the name change is a brand statement and we all know what a dubious premise that is.

He writes, "Sun is blessed to have built two of the best known brands on the internet. The Java brand, and OpenOffice (and its cousin, StarOffice)."

That's mistake number one and two.

One, nobody gives a damn about OpenOffice outside the clique that is the open-source movement. A few people outside try it because a geek tells them that it's a freebie but it's still a poor man's knock-off of MS Office that frustrates because of file-format incompatibilities. Only those self-deluded enough to count downloads think OpenOffice is a success. I've been to Sun events where they stack up copies to give away and still have plenty left at the end of the day. Quite literally, you can't even give it away.

Two, outside of the geek world, nobody knows what Java is, and they don't care either. It's a server-side component, albeit a brilliant one, and world+dog knows that Sun never figured out a way to monetise it. Poor Sun, but then, outside of Solaris, Sun has a rank-bad record in software development. It's so bad it makes HP's software CV look smart.

And anyway, who givesa damn about ticker symbols? Off the top of your head, do you know the ticker for Microsoft, General Electric, AT&T or Oracle? If the answer is yes, you're almost certainly American or work in the financial markets. The rest of us bozos don't own stock and therefore don't read the financial press.

Finally, if Schwartz really believes Java is such a great brand, why not go ahead and change the company name. It's been done countless times before. Think of Wordstar - not that it worked, of course.

Sun is a great server company that already owns a gorgeous brand. If it wants a new ticker symbol it should be straight up and call it UNIX. µ