ON GROKKING SUNW BECOMING JAVA

HEAD-SHAKER

Well, Sun Microsystems (aka SUNW on Nasdaq), is renaming itself JAVA, adopting the name as it's ticker symbol starting Monday.

No, it's not April Fool's.  You can read all about it this incredible move right here on the CEO, Jonathan Schwartz's blog.

Lots of lip service to SUN's legendary history, and about looking to the future, not the past.

But if the brand of a company should be defined by a product or service that has nominal financial impact on the business, but is ubiquitous in market and/or mind-share nevertheless, then several other technology companies should re-name/re-brand themselves immediately. 

Some suggestions:

1.  Microsoft becomes Internet Explorer.

2.  Adobe becomes Acrobat.  The stock symbol?  Why PDF of course, and it's even available.  Could also go with Flash, given that they merged with Macromedia.

3.  AOL becomes AIM, even though they're not a separate public company anymore.

4.  Apple becomes iTunes.

5. Tivo becomes Tivo...oh, they're already Tivo...never mind.

Any others that come to mind?

UPDATE:  The GigaOm takes takes this re-naming thing to a whole different level...see Om Malik's take on the nuttiness here.

UPDATE #2:  Fake Steve Jobs has some thoughts on all this here and here.

UPDATE #3:  The Techmeme discussion on this is getting wild and woolly, and lots of suggestions for other names changes in other posts, and in the comments to this post.

Remember, key to a suggested name change has to be that the product and/or service you're suggesting the company should change their name to, has to have a nominal at best contribution to the revenues/profits of the company. 

At the same time, the suggested name should be a product or service that the company is known for giving away liberally, generally without much financial benefit.

So changing Apple to IPOD (or Microsoft to DOS) wouldn't count, but AOL in it's old days to DISK might, given the huge costs they went to give out their software on disks.

Have at it.

Comments

[Zoli Erdos]

Wait ... shouldn't Microsoft have become DOS a long time ago? Then change to WIN .. then ...
:-)

[Zoli Erdos]

Wait ... shouldn't Microsoft have become DOS a long time ago? Then change to WIN .. then ...
:-)

[Zoli Erdos]

Wait ... shouldn't Microsoft have become DOS a long time ago? Then change to WIN .. then ...
:-)