It will be interesting to see whether Sun Microsystems rejects all advice offered by a Merrill Lynch analyst this week or ends up abiding by any or all of the analyst’s recommendations. Perhaps this might happen in a few years when everyone may have forgotten what the analyst said. In an open letter, analyst Steven Milunovich suggested, among other things, that Sun faces a crisis and must spin off its prized Java programming language and start de-emphasizing its SPARC hardware architecture. It would be easy to expect Sun to reject Milunovich’s drastic words out of hand as just the ramblings of a single analyst. But history tells us Sun has held out against the tide of the industry before and then begrudgingly fell in line. Anybody remember the Open Look vs. Motif battle of the early 1990’s? In that classic match-up, it was Sun Microsystems against the rest of the Unix industry, which had gathered together as the Open Software Foundation in a battle of GUI’s. Sun remained steadfast in support of its Open Look interface while everybody else adopted OSF Motif. After years of resistance, though, Sun endorsed Motif. But it did not matter much anyway because while the Unix camps were like two motorists arguing on the side of the road after a fender-bender, Microsoft sped past both of them and captured the desktop with Windows. More recently, Sun has begun selling Intel systems after flying the SPARC-only hardware flag for years. The company also has begun selling Linux, after holding out as a Solaris Unix-only vendor.Spinning off Java could become an obvious solution for Sun if its losses continue and money is to be made through such a move. Opting for more Intel boxes in its product line over SPARC would already be evident as a move toward adopting the de facto, industry-standard hardware architecture.So will Sun ever spin off Java? Move away from SPARC? Time may surprise us. Technology Industry