Sun Microsystems boss Jonathan Schwartz is playing with fire in claming that the company is the dot in Web2.0.

During the internet boom, Sun's marketing slogan claimed that the company was the dot in dotcom. The claim to fame true. The company's servers powered many start-up and dotcom wannabe.

27 Jul 2006

As the bubble burst, Sun also turned out to be the hot air in the internet hype. Its stock tanked almost as fast as the Webvan empire tumbled.

To my disappointment, Schwartz in his blog posting doesn’t explain why Sun should be considered the dot in Web2.0. Instead he turns on the usual marketing spin about the company's growing sales, the success of Java and so on.

If any company could claim to be the dot in Web2.0 today, it would be Google.

Web2.0 is all about information and how you share, index and retrieve it. They tend to run on standards based open source tools such as MySQL and Linux.

Google is famously running white box servers on a tweaked version of Linux.

I haven't heard of YouTube expressing interest in Sun's project Thumper, pardon, the Sun Fire X4500. Digg.com has yet to show up on the list of Sun's reference customers.

Jonathan, we really should talk. We'll do something like a podcast or video, as long as we can slap on a web2.0 label.

Tags: sun microsystems, web2.0, jonathan schwarz