Is it too premature to ask whether Jonathan has failed? Let me come back to this…Sun has made three big moves in 2008, outside of the non-stop nonsense around openSolaris: MySQL, Glassfish, and JavaFX; let’s break them down, since I have some hours to kill…MySQL at $1B is a laugher, that much can be agreed upon by everyone except Sun’s investor relations department…i understand that it is symbolic of the extent to which OSS has penetrated the enterprise market, and that it probably took a significant price to close the deal without a bidding war, but the execution of making that investment bear out will be as difficult as anything that Sun has ever undertaken…truly, the only measurement that should be taken in to consideration of whether the acquisition was a wise one, is the ability to migrate Oracle DB customers on Sun hardware over to MySQL, not whether some Web 2.0 companies expand their services relationship with Sun…Oracle with the acquisition of BEA, its ongoing efforts around ‘Unbreakable Linux’, and its pricing schemes around multi-core chips are all the proof needed to finally put to rest the supposedly unmatched relationship from these Highway 101 legends: Chuck Phillips runs Oracle’s strategy and Jonathan runs Sun; the historical “friendship” between Larry and Scott is no longer a factor, and Oracle has more to gain from Intel than Sun, regardless of the press releases and whatever the two companies’ sales forces tell customers…Sun needs to port SQL environments to MySQL off of Oracle to maintain account control, at the same time that Oracle tries to maintain the WebLogic-bias in Sun GSO; how Sun makes MySQL competitive with the unquestioned leader in the database market remains to be seen…i am not buying anything that Jonathan says ab/ MySQL focusing on cloud initiatives, because if this were true, there is absolutely zero way to justify $1B… Glassfish is just definitively saving the Sun software business, from the SeeBeyond debacle, to NetBeans’ failure, to even Solaris’ slow death; its Teleco implementation, its ESB, and the ISV opportunities, such as with Liferay, are giving a life-line to Sun GSO, if they could only just make the transition to selling away from WebLogic and on to Glassfish in the downtime while Oracle figures out Fusion, there is hope for all the die-hards (including myself) to justify the immense investment in enterprise software initiated with the Sun-Netscape Alliance…i will admit my historical and biographical bias, but nothing comes close to Glassfish in providing Sun some hope and a raison d’etre for remaining a viable systems vendor…JavaFX is plain ridiculous, wrong-sighted, and D.O.A., enough said…Now back to my former big boss, as Jonathan was Sun’s first EVP of Software prior to his anointment as CEO; his accomplishments are well-known by Sun insiders, most notably Java Studio Creator, Orion, and the Liberty Alliance…what is the common theme of those 3 initiatives? they are undeniable failures, which calls in to question his grasp of software, fundamentally…Creator was E.O.L.’ed, Orion is not even relevant to any product at Sun, and Liberty is a joke to anyone who has even heard of it; combine this with openSolaris, which is not viable in the face of Linux (as anyone outside of Sun would tell u), and u have to wonder what he is doing to make Sun an alternative to IBM and HP services, the Oracle stack, and Dell’s model… I’ll admit I remain a long-term buy on JAVA, but I am increasingly concerned that the small circle of executives with a say, let alone the apologists on the Board and among major shareholders have either no grasp of the emerging enterprise IT marketplace or are just too timid to keep Jonathan in check…I’ll also admit that there are possibilities he will prove me wrong, not least because the guy is relatively young and has enough cash, goodwill, and employee talent to ride out the ongoing disappointment that is quarterly reports…But if a spade were truly called a spade, I would say that McNealy’s hope to turn Jonathan in to a Steve Jobs-like wonderkid with the transition have not been borne out: revenue and the stock are stagnant, the Solaris-mindset is categorically narrowly-focused to the point of being a death knell for the company, and without talking with anyone internally, i sense that employee morale is weakening, as the 10% policy, as well as ongoing additional cuts, take their toll on execution…I am a very small minority, or at least a minority in the sense of those willing to speak the unspeakable, but i will close with the question for Sun stakeholders to ask: how much longer? He is a first-time CEO (still unclear to me how Lighthouse was considered a business worth buying, let alone existing) of a Fortune 500 company…and i am not suggesting that the Red Hat model of bringing in a seasoned outsider is more viable option, so i am not sure what to do…however, giving a newbie a long leash is one thing, running an American icon in to the ground is quite another… I’ll invariably lose some friends/contacts over this post, but would be more than willing to hear from those that are capable of refuting the contents i mention above, I wish all of Sun the best in its endeavor to recover from wounds that were, for-the-most-part, not of its own doing in 2000-01, but it is 2008, its major competitors are growing and moving on, why can Sun not do the same? I am open to your suggestions… Java