Jump for Java

Sun Microsystems’ image is in the shade. Maybe its software can add some shine.

“The Java brand has a value in the billions,” says Scott Kraft, vice president for advertising at Sun Microsystems. Maybe, but proving that will cost him $50 million, or one-half of Sun’s ad budget.

Java, of course, is the omnipresent Internet programming language that Sun engineers created in the mid-1990s. Because it allows otherwise incompatible machines to communicate, Java has worked its way onto an estimated 100 million cell phones worldwide, plus countless Web sites, computers and handhelds.

Sun, a hardware company, never made much from Java, basically giving it away and spending little on the brand. But with a new logo introduced on June 10 and a big print-ad campaign slated for September, the company figures Java is the ticket to win back badly needed credibility.

“This is fundamental,” says Kraft. “We’re battling the misperception of whether we build technologies that reach people all day, or whether we’re a niche player. We are not a niche player.”

The “misperception” may have been aggravated by Sun’s eight consecutive quarters of declining revenue (year-on-year). Its Sparc computer chip and Solaris operating system have been made less relevant by Microsoft Windows, Intel chips and the open-source Linux operating system. Sun has recently yielded to this juggernaut, selling cheaper servers running Linux software on Intel chips.

It’s a stretch to gamble half the year’s ad budget on a product that generates no revenue, while both IBM and Hewlett-Packard, Sun’s biggest competitors, will each spend more than five times that amount to support products that do make money. But Sun craves respect. The Interbrand consultancy in New York figures Sun had a brand value of just $5 billion in 2002, one-third that of HP’s brand value and a tenth of IBM’s.

The new Java push has another goal: to let the world know that Sun is also a software company. The Java awe is supposed to reflect on Sun’s “Project Orion,” a collection of software introduced this year to compete with IBM products. Sun’s financial team, meanwhile, is racing to break out for the first time revenue from software, which is evidently rising even while gear sales fall.

Noting Sun’s swing toward software, the Silicon Valley rumor mill is wondering whether Sun will sustain the 19-year-old Sparc chip program. Mark Tolliver, Sun’s chief strategist, says Sparc will stay alive “as long as we can use it as an innovative differentiator. If it’s a science fair project, it makes no sense.” Fair enough. Meantime, follow the ad money.