By Chris Rugaber (TMF RFK)

As I suspected, Rob's main Bear arguments revolve around issues that even he acknowledges are primarily of interest only to techies. This does not mean that they are not important, of course, but until any of Rob's concerns actually make a noticeable impact on the company's Rule Making financials, count me as not worried about them.

While I am not the software expert that Rob is, his assertion that we are moving into a "post-Microsoft world" may be a bit hasty. Microsoft's current antitrust predicament doesn't really have anything to do with the viability of proprietary software. Most companies are not going to want to download and maintain their own copies of Linux any more than most individuals. The very existence of companies that provide vendor support for Linux indicates that most people and companies don't want to completely do it themselves. In addition, the jury is still out on whether Linux is ready for high-end enterprise servers. Further, Linux has its own problems: Several of its distributors, such as Corel (Nasdaq: CORL), are cutting costs and laying off employees.

Secondly, Rob's comments about Java aren't new. Critics have carped for years about how Sun has handled Java, but this doesn't seem to have caused it that many problems. Last week, 23,000 Java developers attended the fifth annual JavaOne conference, and heard Sun CEO Scott McNealy announce that over 100 million Java smart cards will ship this year, and that the Java logo will appear on cell phones and other wireless devices this year and next. Currently, there are over 2.5 million Java developers, and there were over 3 million downloads of a recent edition of Java.

Some of Sun's most vocal critics, who accuse the company of not going far enough in opening up its Java standards process, happen to be Sun's main competitors in the server space: IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HWP). This does not make their complaints illegitimate or irrelevant, but it certainly makes it less likely that Sun will keep everybody happy. Nevertheless, Sun's recent announcement of two executive committees to oversee the "Java Community Process" was pronounced a "reasonable first step" by Hewlett-Packard's Java strategist.

Rob's suggestion that somehow Sun needs to become more like IBM, a company it is currently clobbering in the server space, is a bit much. Sun has a five-year compound annual EPS growth rate of 38.1% and doesn't seem in any urgent need of a shift in strategy. It is extremely premature to pronounce Sun a company in trouble. Some Linux programmers may be mad at the company, but so what? Based on my admittedly anecdotal experience, a lot of techies have hated Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) for years, but that didn't exactly hurt the share price (the Department of Justice is another matter).

Sun will face stiff competition from IBM and other companies in the next few years, but investors can monitor this through the company's financial statements as much as through tech-oriented news sites such as CNet or ZDNet. As long as Sun can maintain its margins and growth rates, complaints about the Java development process and other such miscellany will remain relatively unimportant.

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