Wall St. Frets Over Sun (JAVA)

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 8, 7:29PM EDT

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Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) titillates investors every year or so with some series of announcements. It is building up its operations in China. It has a new open source software initiative. It will offer vitualization products on its servers. Whatever the next big thing is, Sun has a piece of it.

But, the piece never amounts to much because Sun cannot generate any revenue growth. The sales increases it has had over the last couple of years were due to M&A. The operating income improvements came largely from firing people.

Over the last six months, the market has lost confidence in Sun again. It shares are down 35% over that period. By contrast, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) is off 12% and IBM (NYSE: IBM) is flat.

Sun now gets a chance to prove Wall St. wrong. Expectations for the quarter the company is about to report are embarrassingly modest. Revenue is expected to grow less than 4% to $3.4 billion according to First Call. It is a number that most companies could make with a hand tied behind their backs

Sun is not most companies.

Douglas A. McIntyre.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.