The company believes that Java is a better-known brand than Sun, and that the W in SUNW, which stands for Workstation, does not adequately represent what the company does.

We are no longer simply a workstation company, nor a company whose products can be limited by one category – and Java does a better job of capturing exactly that sentiment than any other four letter symbol, Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz wrote on his blog.

SUNW means Stanford University Network Workstation, a reference to both Sun’s roots at Stanford and its ongoing presence in the computer hardware market.

It’s been the company’s ticker since it went public 21 years ago. But dumping the W doesn’t mean Sun is changing its product focus, according to Schwartz.

To be very clear, this isn’t about changing the company name or focus – we are Sun, we are a systems company, and we will always be a derivative of the students that created us, Stanford University Network is here to stay, he wrote.

The move to have a ticker symbol that represents the market a company is in, rather than the name of the company, is not unprecedented, of course, even in the technology industry.

For example, Salesforce.com’s Nasdaq ticker has always been CRM, a reference to the company’s focus in the on-demand customer relationship management software market.

But Sun makes most of its revenue from server and storage hardware, enterprise software, and professional services. The company does not say how much money it gets directly from Java, but it’s believed to be a rather smaller business.

Our View

Since Sun would be crazy to change its corporate focus along with its ticker symbol, this move is probably best considered a marketing gimmick designed to entice the kind of investors who are attracted to a stock by brand recognition rather than business fundamentals.

Unlike Salesforce.com, which wears its CRM ticker because it makes almost all of its money from hosted CRM licenses, it is widely believed that Sun makes a relatively piddling sum directly from Java.

Nobody outside of Sun knows for sure how much revenue Java brings in, because Sun has never broken out that business in its financial reports. Schwartz said over a year ago that it would start to do so, but the company has not yet followed through on that statement.

But Schwartz, former head of Sun’s software business, and his predecessor Scott McNealy, have often indicated that Java is a loss leader that drives some or most of the revenue in other more lucrative business segments like services and servers.

In May 2006, Schwartz wrote on his blog: I say most of our revenue is derived from Java. Just like most of Verizon’s revenue comes from handsets… Those that believe free software or service yields lower revenue don’t understand the economics or dynamics of the software industry.

It’s never been entirely clear to us how the Verizon analogy is supposed to work. When you buy a Verizon phone, you’re locked into paying Verizon a monthly sum for the use of its network. Java has no such strings attached.

Schwartz acknowledged that it’s hard to explain the model in an IDG News interview that same week last year.

It’s a tough thing for the Street to understand, he said. Revenue to Sun is a lagging indicator of the adoption of our developer platforms.

One year on, Sun appears to be trying to explain this model to Wall Street in another way, by changing its ticker symbol to JAVA — a set of products that could very well bring in an insignificant amount of direct revenue but which, allegedly, underpins everything the company does.

A quick poll of the over 100 comments posted by users, employees and investors on Schwartz’s blog yesterday shows that a significant majority think the change of ticker is a stupid idea.