http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aWIiXrGajk3w

I’m also former Sun employee as are several of my colleagues at Red Hat !

Lets consider the corollary (sorry for the pun.. funny if anyone is familiar with the Intel acquisition of that namesake) that a BigJava house (Oracle, IBM, even Redhat) get a hold of Java as I describe above. If consumer branding is so irrelevant, why did IBM see it fit to sponsor the Olympics, tennis matches, golf tournaments (many of these have ended but usually because of greedy organizers)? IBM was a household name because for all intensive purposes they gave us commercial and later personal computing. This brand is quickly fading. People in my generation hardly know of the company anymore, much less what they do other than “computers”, which is false these days for what most think when they say “computers”. The Java brand and market is a big deal. This isn’t negated just because Sun poorly manages and executes it (as you said, their business people are questionable). Anyways, too much marketing crap – the Java brand is just once piece of what make Java and Sun lucrative to a whole host of companies if they are to be bought out.

Unfortunately, customers of a company which is bought out aren’t guaranteed to stay with the acquiring company. They may very well make the decision to rebid their contracts, and look at other alternatives once their previous supplier (whether it was Digital, Compaq, Sequent, Data General, etc.) is acquired, and there’s no guarantee they will pick the company that acquired their current supplier of their computing needs.

And if it is true (as the Forbes article claims) that HP and IBM are having no problems convincing customers to switch to their respective companies without having to buy Sun, maybe it’s not worth it to go through the acquisition exercise. In practice, so many “big name” computer acquisitions (HP’s acquistion of Apollo, Compaq’s acquisition of Digital, Sun’s acquisition of Cobalt Networks, Red Hat’s acquisition of JBOSS, and many, many others) have just not worked out. Often the employees end up walking; customers decide that it’s time to go elsewhere, and in the end the synergies often don’t work out and it becomes a huge distraction for the acquiring company.

In some ways I was disappointed that Microsoft didn’t buy Yahoo. Some friends I know there would have been able to collect on their golden parachutes, and would have made a killing, and it would have been a massive cash drain and massive distraction for Microsoft for at least a year or two, maybe more.

I’d put it a different way: the only time IBM chooses to exert itself in selling or marketing software is when it can make $$$ on it. OK, Sun has a piece of sofwtare, the Windows JRE, on around 90% of the desktop. Great. What, exactly, is that worth? How can they monetize it? Free branding? OK, a whole bunch of soccer moms might see “Sun” and the steaming coffee cup logo for a few seconds each time the JRE fires up. Are they going to making the purchasing decision on some expensive piece of Sun gear? OK, suppose the same JRE splash screen also shows up on a CIO’s desktop whenever s/he fires up some Java program or applet. How much effect will that have on whether that CIO will choose to buy Sun Storage or Sun Servers?

Sun has been shipping Java on the Desktop for years; surely if it’s such a great brand success, their top line sales revenue must be growing every quarter… no wait… it isn’t. Oops.

One of the reasons why I have a lot of respect for IBM is that it doesn’t spend a huge amount of time crowing about the great technology that it has contributed into OSS and Linux. The CEO of IBM doesn’t have a blog crowing about all of the great technologies IBM has implemented and then donated to the OSS/Linux community. However, IBM does issue joint press releases with its customers when some of its technology (some of which is proprietary, such as the real-time JRE, and some of which was open source and donated to the community, such as the work we did testing and making production-ready the real-time Linux technology) is useful for solving a real-world customer problem — because maybe other customers will decide that a company that delivers solutions for them is more interesting than a company where the CEO blogs about what great technology that company has.

Great technology, if it is part of a solution that a customer is delighted to pay money to acquire because it will that customer to save even more money or make even more money, helps drive a company’s bottom line.

Great technology that is not part of a solution and $3.50 will buy you a cup of expensive coffee at Starbuck’s.