Negative revenue trends and net losses every quarter will hammer market value, regardless of the stock.

As a sector, Sun is part of the tech group and investors have high expectations for these companies.

AAPL and GOOG, for example, posted stellar quarters, but cautious guidance on the next quarter dampened their upside.

For Sun, over the last few years, bad quarters have been the norm, not the exception.

They are an undervalued company - but one can make that case for CSCO, INTC and MSFT as well.

What really hurts Sun is that their strategy appears clouded. They have 1900 Solaris engineers, they have tons of research going on all over their place and most of it is above average.

Assets like JAVA (which is also their stock symbol) have not been monetized well. It is ridiculous that IBM, BEA/Oracle, JBoss etc. have bigger footholds for enterprise application server deployments than Sun.

In the last few years they have realized that mistake and invested in Glassfish, which is an excellent effort, but very late. The JRE has been absurdly large, making it cumbersome for people wanting to deploy Rich Apps on the JWS/Swing platformm.... although Java 6 Update 10 changed that.... and Java 7 will improve it further.... again too late... the high ground has been lost to Silverlight, GWT and Flex.

Their Forte acquisition went nowhere. Their NetBeans strategy continues to confuse in contrast to Eclipse, but it has some great ideas.

Solaris and ZFS are superb projects, but again, open sourcing it to compete with Linux as a server platform came too late.

Then their SPARC + X86 strategy on their servers makes their operational complexity higher than say.... DELL. JavaFX - going nowhere fast.... the list of well engineered projects executed and marketed badly is endless.

They need a world-class operations person as their CEO, not a gifted nerd. That's where the turnaround would start.

Cheers,

Zubin.