Seems like every high-tech company now has “branding police.” You know, the often self-appointed individuals who zealously and insanely guard what they consider to be their company’s brand identity. Well, I wonder what the branding police at Sun Microsystems think about the company’s latest move.
TechIQ reports that Sun is officially changing its stock symbol from the long-time SUNW to JAVA. Presumably, this should be obvious to all the Valley’s cognoscenti, since Java (not workstations) has been the center of Sun’s universe (wait, isn’t the sun the center of our universe? Never mind.) for nearly a decade.
OK, I’ll grant Sun that they need to make Sun and Java occupy the same space in everyone’s mind. And over the years, many software companies have actually changed their corporate names to correspond to their flagship product, like Progress Software and Informix. But isn’t dropping a long-used (more than 20 years) stock symbol that is logically linked to the company’s name a little like changing your URL? Maybe we should expect to see that big company in Armonk, New York, change its symbol from IBM to LNUX.
What’s next — changing the corporate Web address to www.java.com? (Oops, Sun already has that one — it’s all things Java.) I’m sure Sun would strongly debunk this notion, but they will undoubtedly find themselves besieged by lots of questions (many from very smart IT buyers, not dolts) who will want to know why Sun no longer is selling workstations or servers.
Maybe the next logical step is for Sun to change its official name to something like Java Technologies, or Java Solutions. Hey, the New York Yankees have a very exciting and outstanding rookie pitcher named Joba Chamberlain; maybe Sun can ask him to change the spelling of his name. (Yankees fans can revel in the notion of legendary public address announcer Bob Sheppard intoning: “Now pitching for the Yankees, number sixty-two, Java Chamberlain.”) Talk about creative ways to work corporate sponsorships into sports!
