Forty-Two

New Brand, New Day?

I was sitting in my hotel room from Bangalore last evening when I came across the RSS feed from "El Reg" regarding the change from the SUNW stock symbol to JAVA. My first reaction was, "is this a joke". I immediately typed this thought to my fellow openInstaller community members on our IRC chat channel. We made some jokes and poked a lot of fun at the report, which by then was confirmed by Jonathan's blog entry. We knew there would be mass resistance internally, and probably externally too. Sure enough, for the most part, that has been the initial reaction. Most of the comments are against the change. Is it because this is the usual reaction to change? Maybe. I admit that some of the issues in the comments are constructive.

Since I am no marketing expert, and certainly no financial expert (if you saw my portfolio you would understand),  I will trust  the people who are the experts and are doing all they can to grow awareness of Sun, worldwide. Maybe this change will translate into many new opportunities for Sun. Perhaps from business leaders and decision makers who know about Java by seeing it on their cell phones, or browsers. The new JAVA symbol will lead them to check out all the other goodies Sun has to offer. Also, I place a lot of trust in someone who creates results.  I believe that Jonathan and his team have created some amazing results. Since that team has taken over the helm we have seen way more positives than negatives. Sure, Sun has had to reduce it's workforce in order to keep costs down which does mean letting go of our most precious commodity, very smart, hardworking people. Seeing my friends and colleagues leave saddened me but I understood the need and I know these former co-workers, who are some of the best and brightest, would land on their feet. Many have since come back because Sun provides a great work environment. The changes made by the executive management team have created great results. With Jonathan at the helm we have returned to profitability, shipped an excellent OS in Solaris 10, increased Sun's commitment to community and open source, increased Java usage around the world, built some amazing servers and desktops, changed the face of software licensing and much more. In the end that's what will determine if the change to JAVA was the right thing to do. So, after sleeping on it, really reading Jonathan's blog and many others, I say let's go for it. "Change is good" is my motto and after all I love having a cup of java while the sun is rising.

Posted at 01:03AM Aug 24, 2007 by Matt Williamson in Sun  |