Sun Microsystems, Inc. (JAVA)

Java makes many games on the internet work, including Runescape, but it does not get any money for being downloaded so I wonder how it would ever go up

These guys dropped the ball with IBM.

IBM backed out.

Great call, RookieQB! You saved me a lot of cash with your cynical, but accurate, post! I was sure the SUN/IBM deal was done, but I guess not. I would be so mad right now if I had bought JAVA at eight bucks a share! Looks like it's back to four bucks a share now!

Sell off after huge jump on news IBM is buying them.

crappy company with crappy strategy and crappy execution. i remember the days of $5B qtrly revenues. My the heights from they have fallen . . . .

There is a major transition occurring in the tech industry, and "economic cycles help" to quote Sam Palmisano. Whether Sun can retain enough momentum and credibility to weather the storm is another question.

Jonathan is turning the company into a very different kind of animal focused on becoming "The Dot in Web 2.0" and attempting to position Sun to earn a silver lining from "The Cloud". If he makes it, Sun will be a very different company, but very possibly viable in an entirely new guise.

In the meantime, I'd back HP, IBM and Cisco to be the leading and profitable IT infrastructure companies going forwards.

Motley Fool's 3 Tech Stocks to Sell in 2009 - poor balance sheets

Sun has good products (Java, Solaris, hardware, we'll see about JavaFX), but they're not really in a position to really benefit from them in part because none of them really dominate the competition. Their move to open source the Java and Solaris shows that they're getting a bit desperate.

I think that the coming slump is likely going to hit them harder than most.

Look, since when has Sun outperformed expectations? Until they get rid of Schwartz and other upper manglers they aren't going to turn around. This company needs an Lou Gerstner to come along and kick some business sense into a hidebound techhead company. Otherwise the stock may be underpriced now but the value is dribbling out the door. In 2 years the price will be about right. Save your cash for a company that you can save.

Look for big news Aug 1

I think Sun's legacy of brilliant visionary insights combined with aracane nerdiness is finally catching up with it.

It is a company fo people who -enjoy- programming in Linux - Hat's off to them! It has not, however, really made an effective transition in to the 21st century market place. It has one foot stuck firmly in the geek, hobbyist mentality of the 1980s and 1990s.

Don't expect anything out of them in the August report. I anticipate a year or two of slow bleeding before someone comes along and buys them out at 5 bucks a share.

Just haven't gotten their mojo back since the Y2K market crash. Don't think they are going to make much money out of opensource. If I'm wrong I'll be happy.

Sun is a trading stock and much of its glory is gone. They manufacture high quality machines and are branching out with MySQL and OpenOffice but I'm not sure how these will bring the company to it's lofty levels of the past.

Sun has no business model. For Microsoft, that's fine for the moment because they rake in the cash. But Sun doesn't. They live in a world of ever shrinking margins depending on Java to bring recognition, but precious little else.

The company has no future.

I think they are a great company with awesome products. This comes from working in the IT field. I also think that there market is being cannibalized by cheap junk computers. It sucks, but that is how it is.

This stock has repeatedly been a disappoint since the 2001 bubble.

Sun made its money building large fast servers. Now notebook computers have the power SUN was selling as an shared logic server. Their technology has become a commodity. AMD CPUs incorporate much the same architecture on a cpu chip that sun had on its CPU memory boards that sold for thousands. The low end commodity market can produce a computer system more powerful than the sun systems of just a few years ago. The low cost servers keep taking more and more of what sun has left. Sun does not do well in the low end market. They want to be your big computer company. Problem is there are not that many place left that really need computing that cannot be done more uneconomically with networked commodity system. Google is one of the largest users of computer power and they do it all with lots of little commodity systems at a much lower price point that what sun would charge for a replacement system.

It's a bad stock in a (currently) bad sector. Sell short.