A dying Sun shows how the Java brand was wasted

If, like me, you have a Google Alert for "Java" in your RSS reader, you'd know that today's big news was the release of the latest version of the Sun Java Communications Suite. If, unlike me, you don't pay attention to the minutia of the Java ecosystem, you might think that this is an exciting communications product based somehow on Sun's flagship Java technology.

Ha ha, surprise! While this is a "suite," which of course means "unholy conglomeration of components that we've mashed together in order to sell support for," and presumably there's Java in there somewhere, in fact there's nothing inherently Java-centric about it. The two most important components in the suite -- the Sun Java Calendar Server and the Sun Java System Messaging Server -- ultimately derive from products developed in the late 1990s under the umbrella of Sun's iPlanet alliance with Netscape.

The fact that this suite has "Java" (or, more specifically, "Sun Java") plastered all over it is just another legacy of Sun's attempt to use what they must have assumed was a well-liked brand name to sell everything, no matter how much this confused the issue of what exactly Java was and what it was good for. It's a practice that's subsided somewhat -- even the Java Desktop System, which is really nothing more than Unix desktop environment, is generally billed as OpenSolaris Desktop these days -- but as the today's triumphant press releases indicate, it hasn't gone away completely. If there's one thing that the laser-beam focused Oracle marketers should get rid of right away, it's this.