Nothing to lose

See correction below

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WHATEVER SUN IS paying Software Group Vice President Jonathan Schwartz, it's not enough. After just 45 minutes onstage at InfoWorld's Next-Generation Web Services II conference in Santa Clara, Calif., Schwartz yanked Sun Microsystems out of its full-throttle PR nosedive. Sun now has two things it didn't have before Schwartz took over: a mission and a message.

The mission is not to dominate (that's too expensive for now), but to keep any other vendor from attaining dominance. The message is Java. From now on, everything Sun does in software will be to further Java. If Sun is smart, it will apply the same strategy to hardware; the IT lull allows Sun to focus on positioning Java as a brand instead of engaging competitors in a feature race.

There are kernels of real substance mixed in with Sun's posturing, repositioning, and retreading. It's a pity Sun buried its gems so deep in manure that much of IT won't see them. Sun's trusted, lightweight PC, its desktop Linux, and its donation of $6 billion-worth of StarOffice to the world's underprivileged are like McGuffins, the dead-end plot distractions Alfred Hitchcock tossed into his movies.

But Sun's McGuffins aren't pure decoys. They're zero-cost initiatives meant to wedge open key markets until Sun has the money to pursue them. Sun doesn't want a competitor, the open-source movement, or standards bodies to smother it while it hibernates through this long winter.

Schwartz's definition and defense of Sun's software strategy is still peppered with pretzel logic, FUD, and incongruities. That approach isn't unique to Sun -- wily pitchmen will be more valued than innovators until vendors' R&D budgets recover. But I worry that some of Schwartz's whoppers -- such as his assertions that IBM is abandoning AIX and that Linux incurs zero management costs -- will blind observers to the substance that matters to IT.

You might have missed that Schwartz referred to Java 2 as open source, and he promised to fix Sun's strained relations with JBoss and other open-source Java projects. J2EE application servers are, in Schwartz's words, "an operating system feature, not an industry." Sun made the dramatic decision to include the Mozilla browser, not Netscape Navigator, in its commercial Linux desktop as a way of punishing AOL for sticking with Internet Explorer.

The brilliant part of Sun's strategy is its economy. Sun is portraying innovative stasis as the high ground. It is defending its relevance by refusing to admit its relevance was ever in question. It is retroactively co-opting IBM's goodwill with the open-source and free software movements while portraying IBM as a tech dinosaur. It is reclaiming Java by pretending that IBM and BEA never took it away.

Yes, there are precious few needles in Sun's massive PR haystack. But they're silver needles worth picking out, and that haystack looks pretty good when the light hits it just right.

Correction

In this column, we misreported Jonathan Schwartz's title. He is executive vice president of Sun's software group.