How bizarre. Java is (however widely deployed or well engineered) passe at this point. Why try to completely associate with something that was hot 10 years ago?

You need to get out some more kid, seriously. When you're out of mom's basement, walk around the corner, get a job, and you'll witness first-hand, java's remarkable penetration. Obviously, this doesn't speak for the language's effectiveness.

Disregarding the borderline ad hominem attack here, I'd suggest you misunderstood my post. I actually mention that Java has huge penetration--I just don't think associating a company with a $17B market cap to a programming language (which I contend is a bit boring at this point) is all that cool.

Passe is a poor choice of word, especially with java's sustainable growth. The brand has excellent marketability, it's wise to leverage it.

"sustainable growth"... that means 'not too rapid', right?

JavaME is not passe. It is still the most widely adopted cross-platform on-deck mobile phone environment and is continuing to grow. Sun is also really pushing the upcoming JavaFX, which is the successor to JavaME. This is not old stuff.

No it's not old stuff, and my original post mentioned Java's strengths. My point, however, is more towards marketing. As far as I'm concerned Sun is interesting now due to their innovation in other areas--Solaris, ZFS, Niagra, and "green" datacenters. Java just isn't all that cool anymore.

I would argue though that Java is cool now because of the emerging mobile device software sector. Maybe its just me but I find this area very exciting and Sun is doing things right by pushing for a open, unified cross device platform. Proprietary closed platforms like the iPhone are evil. From a marketing perspective, this could be very important in the next 5 years as mobile phone software usage continues to grow.

I am strangely reminded of an academic paper that came out, shortly before the (first) dot-com bubble popped, reporting that even after controlling for all sorts of other factors, companies saw their stock value go up after appending ".com" to their names.

Also, of VA Linux, which went public with the ticker symbol LNUX, decided they didn't want to be distributing Linux hardware after all, and changed their ticker symbol to, umm, something I don't remember. (Disclaimer: I used to own stock in LNUX.)

Next up: AAPL changes their ticker symbol to IPOD.

And MSFT becomes BSOD

I like MSFT -> EVIL

This is hilarious. Sun is the only company that hasn't figured out a way to make money off Java...this won't work either.

First it was the "we are the dot in dotcom", now this :(.

I'm surprised that the NASDAQ even allows this.