If all goes well, by the time I put my next post up Sun’s shareholders will have voted the company out of existence. Sun is sputtering into the sunset, revealing a a worse than expected loss in its final quarter as an independent company. And the last big Java-related announcement from Sun is pretty anti-climactic: anyone downloading the latest version of Java will be offered a 30-day trial for Carbonite, a data backup Web service that normally goes for $55 a year.Now, I’m sure that Carbonite is a perfectly good service (and really, your humble blogger could probably do with an offsite backup for his own files; anything that would wipe out his laptop would probably also wipe out the external hard drive sitting six inches away from it on the desk). And one can understand Carbonite’s excitement on getting access to however many Java installs there are out there; the company’s CEO says that they’ve been working on this deal for more than a year. But there’s just something kind of tawdry about Sun making money by glomming other services onto Java that have very little to do with the technology’s purpose, except that both Java and Carbonite involve computers; its similar to the Sun-Microsoft deal that brought the MSN toolbar to IE users via Java updates. I’m reminded of dying companies that sell off their last assets — their list of customer email addresses — just to get a few last dollars.If there’s one thing I’m guessing about the future with Oracle, it’s this: Oracle isn’t going to be making many deals with companies that sell things for $55 a year. Oracle is a firmly enterprise-focused company: something that apparently has the big software companies that rely to one degree or another on Java (which is to say all of them) quaking in terror. Interesting times ahead! Technology Industry