Blogging Roller

Todays news that Sun's stock ticker will change from SUNW to JAVA was met with pretty mixed reactions both inside and outside of Sun. On the day of the announcement, the more than 170 comments on Jonathan Schwartz's blog announcement were mostly negative and though there are some positive reactions in the interblogonet, they come mostly from Sun employees.

Below are the posts that I've seen in my feed reader so far.

• Barton George (Sun): "bold move"
• David Van Couvering (Sun): "Wow. Bold, audacious, wild."
• BlogBridge blog: "That’s good news for us" - reaction from a Java ISV
• Nick Wooler (Sun): "reinforces the brand"
• Jonathan Hawkins (Sun): "good idea"
• Bruce Hill (Sun): "certainly a cooler name"
• Glynn Foster (Sun): "massively supportive"
• Jason Beloro (Sun) "already a success"
• Fake Schwartz: "we're open sourcing the stock as well!"
• Marc Kossa (Sun): "I like it !"
• Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine (Sun): "turning out to be a very good communication strategy"

• <a href= "http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/geir/archives/001609_applause_ssunwjava.html">Evil Geir (ASF): "brilliant" (with extreme sarcasm)
• Geoff Arnold (formerly Sun): "This is simply silly"
• Sam Ruby (ASF): JCP (JCP with the C for Community crossed out)
• Shawn Ferry (Sun): "I preferred SUNW" via Twitter
• Dan Latcher (Sun): "don't see the point"
• Murphee's Rant: "Run for the hills, folks! "
• Dion Almer: "Oh momma"
• Paul Krill, InfoWorld: "likely to cause confusion"
• C. G. Walters: "army of hamsters" (sorry, that's my favorite part)
• Sanjiva Weerawarana (ASF): "incredibly bad idea"
• James Robertson: "dilutes Sun's brand"
• Daring Fireball: "shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic"
• Catherine Helzerman: "Java isn’t just Sun"
• Tim Bray (Sun): "I hate it."

• James Gosling (Sun): "totally bizarre"
• James Duncan Davidson: "something not to be done lightly" (good story, don't miss it)
• Kevin Chu (Sun): "In light of our change..."
• Jim Jagielski : "The next several months will be very telling indeed."
• Garbage Collection blog (Sun): "Maybe it might work"
• Madhan Kumar Balasubramanian (Sun): "What is this?"
• C. Enrique Ortiz: "[Sun] is very committed to Java"

What do I think? I'm not sure what I think of the change. The ticker SUNW was out of date because "workstations" are so 80s man, so it's a good thing to update it. And Java ISVs like BlogBridge should like the vote of confidence in Java. On the negative side, it's easy to search for SUNW to get Sun news and that won't work as well with the new ticker. And Java's not all Sun does. One more point. I'm not sure most folks really care what the ticker name is. If they did, don't you think Sun would have changed it years ago?

By the way. I didn't mean the hit the post button on this entry so soon, but it's out there now so I might as well let it stand. I'll update over the next day or two as reactions roll in.

UPDATE: Ed Burnette has a positive, neutral, negative and funny breakdown of his 25 favorite comments from Jonathan's blog post. He says that "Stockholders and employees are among the most vocal critics." of the change.