Sun, Google, Give Me a Break

David Card | October 04, 2005, 10:56 PM

I have a long history with Sun Microsystems. CEO Scott McNealy told me I wrote his first cover story. (He also once told me he'd never build a computer that cost more than $100,000. Who knew Sun would turn into a mainframe company?) When I was an IT analyst in the 80s and 90s, Sun was one of the coolest companies going. It invented the idea of selling "open systems" -- ha, what a hoax -- and led the league in distributed computing. Killed off DEC, gave Microsoft and IBM a black eye every now and then. Even scared Intel for a second.

Sad to say, Sun stopped being relevant to the future of computing even before the Internet bubble, probably when Bill Joy moved to Aspen. Jini was brilliant but way too far ahead of its time. Sun blew any chances for Java to really matter. Shoulda merged with Netscape, IBM, Oracle.

So this Google-Sun thing is meaningless. Analysts posing as consumer experts who think otherwise are naively betraying their parent company's IT roots. Now, if Google bought Sun, and went whole hog with Jini and Java....