|~|commentscottbody.jpg|~|Scott McNEaly and co made Sun Microsystems of the biggest names in the dot com boom.|~|As we’ve written before, it wasn’t so long ago since Sun Microsystems was seen as the hippest of the hip young gunslingers: the server firm pretty much had it made as the dot com boom saw the dollars roll in for Scott McNealy and co.
It could even claim in its marketing — with some accuracy — to be the ‘dot in dot com’.
Of course, all that meant that the subsequent dot com bust hit Sun harder than its less fashionable rivals. While HP and IBM also saw sales slump in the early 2000s, both those firms have recovered rather better than Sun.
As any pop band knows, being at the cutting edge of fashion one day can risk you being very definitely out of fashion the next.
So Sun customers — and perhaps more importantly shareholders — may not be overly cheered by the news that Sun’s president and chief operating officer, Jonathan Schwartz, has now decided that he wants to be the dot in Web 2.0. Not least because nobody seems able to agree on what Web 2.0 really is.
For those of you who haven’t heard the term Web 2.0 (people with busy lives, worthwhile jobs, etc) it is the latest US buzzword, one originally coined by a US publishing firm to describe the ‘new wave’ of web sites and firms linked with the web ( a new wave of new wave, if you want to keep the pop analogy going).
The publishing firm coined the term last year to promote a conference on that topic. This has led plenty of people to dismiss ‘Web 2.0’ as just marketing hype, without any substance behind it at all.
However, supporters of Web 2.0 can point to some solid evidence that the web is a serious business proposition again (at least for now, anyway). Search giant Google is currently the hottest IT firm, the one that everybody else seems to have to define themselves against.
And eBay’s shelling out of US$4 billion for Skype, which had revenues of just US$7 million, would have been a big deal in the 1990s, never mind the supposedly more cautious climate of today.
Web 2.0 is supposedly all about improving user experience (think blogs as opposed to personal home pages) and making the web the central platform for IT (think software as a service delivered online, rather than paying for a licence).
All of which sounds great if you are a struggling server firm that is trying hard to make your product lineup seem as current as possible.
For Schwartz, we can see the appeal of becoming that dot again: Sun just needs to make sure that dot doesn’t end in bust again.
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