Simon’s Blog

In my last blog entry, I said that a surrogate marker for recognising a great CEO is that they’re not afraid to ruffle a few feathers. Just a few days later, as if to exemplify my point, Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz has done exactly that on his blog. In an entry entitled - The Rise of JAVA - The Retirement of SUNW - Jonathan announced (both to the world, and also to Sun employees) that, next week, Sun is to change it’s NASDAQ stock ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA.

Now, if you don’t work at Sun (or invest in Sun), this doesn’t affect you in the slightest. So you’re probably thinking - Who cares? What’s the big deal? It’s only the ticker symbol they’re changing. That was pretty much my first thought, actually (after all, Sun is nothing to do with me, beyond being a customer). My second thought, however, was - Uh oh… he’s really going to upset people with this one! Why? Well, anyone that’s ever held a senior role in a medium or large sized company, knows that most employees (i.e. people!) really dislike change. I mean, really. That’s neither a good thing, nor a bad thing, by the way. It’s just the way most human beings are built. This is something you learn about very quickly the first time you ever first stand up in front of the whole company to announce what you think is an exciting new initiative/project/plan; only to find that most of the people in the audience are worrying about it, rather than feeling positive.

My point is this - I’m sure Jonathan knew exactly what he was doing by making his announcement in the way that he did. He wanted to ruffle some feathers, and get people talking. He succeeded - check out the comments (196 and counting!).

What’s the big deal about this announcement? Well, if you don’t know about stock ticker symbols, one thing to realise is that, when writing about companies, people sometimes (perhaps even often) refer to companies not by their names, but rather by their ticker symbols. So, in in Sun’s case, lots of people call Sun, not “Sun”, but “SUNW”. From next week, then, some people will start actually calling Sun, “JAVA”; and certainly, when people write about Sun in a business context, they will mention the ticker symbol, as in “Sun Microsystems (JAVA) today announced…”

So, what this announcement does is acknowledge the simple fact that Java is a far, far bigger brand than Sun; and Sun people (especially those that don’t work on Java) were never going to like being told that. Predictably then, attached to the blog entry, there’s a long stream of negative comments, predicting doom and gloom, saying that: the old ticker symbol is much better; saying that the new one is bad, because Java is a terrible brand; saying that this is terrible news for Java because Java is a great brand etc. Of course, in reality, people are simply expressing their general dislike of change. There are also some hilarious comments that Jonathan allowed through - my absolute favourite is from Glynn Foster, who wrote :

Dude! You totally could have changed it to ‘PONY’ - everyone would have wanted one!

Now, you won’t get that joke if you don’t read the Fake Steve Jobs blog (although, is there anyone in the technology business that doesn’t read it?). However, in case you don’t read Fake Steve, the joke is this - on that blog, Jonathan is known as “My Little Pony” due to the trademarked ponytail… Kudos to Jonathan for allowing that comment, btw (not many CEOs would have let that go through). Kudos also for shaking things up a bit.

Anyway, after all that, what do I think of the new ticker symbol?   It’s fine.  It might have been better to use VMW though.  That could have driven Sun’s market cap up from $17B, to just over $100B…