KWPro.net

I caught an article on how Sun Microsystem's continuing drop in finances is causing a lot of worry for the company's future.  With Wall Street's massive downturn, Sun will face a great deal of problem with IT spending massively slowing as their big customers traditionally have been in the finance industry.  Likewise, Sun's commitment to open source technologies, while noble in statement, have not helped Sun increase its coffers.

I've been saying for a while now that Sun's various schemes have been nothing more than smoke and mirrors.  The change from SUNW to JAVA had done nothing to propel the company forward.  In fact, even with the stock buyback, the company's stock continued to spiral downward, an effect that has been ongoing since the dot coms blew up back in 2000.

So the big question is: what's next for Sun?

Despite the poor decisions in upper management that have gone on through the years, Sun as a technology company still has good assets in their people and technologies.  There had been some rumors a while back of Google purchasing Sun.  In truth, the moment is probably right where Google can finally make its move.

The integration of Sun and Google makes tons of sense:

• Many of the staff from Google are formerly Sun employees.
• The Stanford connection.
• The long term vision of cloud computing that Sun had started a few years ago.
• Google's need for the hardware aspects.
• The claim to major open source technologies in Java and Mysql.

Sun has just been far too slow in open sourcing Java, but if Google were to pick Sun up, this movement can go full force.  Google can then be the major provider (and protecter) of several key technologies, providing a full supported solution from top to bottom.  They can even form a secondary business in the hardware area or provide consulting services for major finance companies to move their systems to the cloud.  I think that move would actually work quite well for finance companies as most often times struggle with issues like downtime, the cost of system administrators, hardware, data centers, etc.  In turn, these companies can focus their IT spending purely on business development, allowing an expert company like Google handle the infrastructure side.  Many of Google's services like single signon can be provided to companies that often times use a hodge-podge of technologies.

I see this move to make far more sense than the Microsoft-Yahoo deal.  I really am looking at Google as an infrastructure company for the web in the future, rather than a search or webware (whatever you want to call it) company.