As noted, Java aficionados are in a curious position vis-a-vis Sun as a (financially flailing) publicly traded corporation. Their fortunes are tied to the company, but little that has to do with Java itself seems to affect JAVA’s stock price or financial status. akok, a poster on the Motley Fool’s financial message boards, wraps it up delightfully neatly: [Sun] still owns Java, but seems unable to parlay its one dominant platform into revenue. Primarily because Java was built from ground up to be hardware agnostic, and in doing so, Sun commoditized the hardware (instead of the software as it had intended). It, um, seems kind of painfully obvious when you put it that way, doesn’t it? “Hey, we make our profits on high-end hardware; let’s develop a software platform that will run on both high-end and low-end hardware, and then give it away for free!” Technology Industry