In the goldfish bowl of the blogosphere, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's move, which became a reality yesterday, to dump SUNW as Sun's NASDAQ stock ticker and replace it with JAVA was always going to be a high-visibility item. His own blog post announcing the move, which averages 50 comments, attracted seven times that (currently 364).

In the parlance of poker, it is clear that Schwartz is going "all-in" on Java.

Under the heading "SUNW is no more," one blogger was succinct: "Sun changed their ticker to JAVA. Seems wrong somehow."

"I guess Sun is just trying to find that next motivational tool for itself through this ticker change," wrote another blogger, Amar Sesh, as reactions continued to circulate around the blogosphere. "I hope that they don't continue to invest in products and services that don't make money for their investors, especially shareholders."

Sesh continued, expressing a concern that it wasn't clear how much Java gains Sun in financial terms:

"Remember Sun's statement The Network is the Computer? They were a company focused on servers and at making them powerful. With Java, Sun gets licensing fees from vendors (such as IBM, BEA, cell phone OEMs, Sony for PS3) and others for using Java, but it's not clear how much from their financial statements. Where Microsoft and Bill Gates succeeded in extracting their share of increased worldwide productivity, Sun failed. Java is my 'bread and butter' and I appreciate what it did to corporations worldwide. But investors would surely differ."

"Changing SUNW to JAVA on the stock exchange is a good way to move to the future. Representing the diversity of technology that Sun produces. One just hopes that they don't replace every instance of SUNW with JAVA in there Solaris source. I noticed it in Solaris packaging specs as part of field names. As that will cause the same type of confusion calling Solaris's gnome desktop the Java desktop."

"Final nail in JCP's coffin?"

"I hate this change, but after sleeping on it overnight I realized it's just a ticker symbol and has little real effect ... unless marketing decides to return to naming misappropriation such as Java Desktop System."

As was only to be expected, the Slashdot community had a field day. Comments on the move ranged from the mildly critical ("A name change is not going to help them. Nobody is going to buy until they increase earnings.") to the characteristically contrary ("Wouldn't JAVA make more sense as Starbucks' stock symbol? I liked SUNW.")

On comp.unix.solaris, Frank Cusack speculated intriguingly on The Shape of Things to Come: "How long until Solaris becomes JavaOS?" 

To which Colin B. bitterly added his own speculation/inference:

"Now we know why Sun hasn't released an OS update in 10 months. Suddenly, the lack of consistency in Solaris 10 service names (as per another thread) makes perfect sense. The complete lack of workaround/fix/patch information in sunsolve bug reports over the past two years falls nicely into place today. Sun has quit being a technology company, and turned into a marketing company."

"My take is that (after the discussion's calmed down a bit) it doesn't really affect me much... At most, I'll end up rewiring a couple of stock-checking bookmarks, and rewriting Schedule D on my next 1040 when I (almost certainly) get it wrong. Other than that, I'm driving on. I've got other stuff to sweat."

• 'SUNW' Is No Longer Valid; Today It Has Changed To 'JAVA'
• "Live By the Blog, Die By the Blog" – Sun's CEO Gives (Inadvertent) Masterclass