When will Wall Street wake up?

In case you had any lingering doubts as to whether Sun has been doing the right thing by embracing the Open Source model, take a moment to peruse an entry from Jonathan Schwartz' Blog. I'll quote the part that caught my attention:

As you may have seen, we've announced our fourth quarter and full fiscal year results ... We grew revenue, expanded gross margins, streamlined our operating expenses - and closed the year with an 8% operating profit in Q4, more than double what some thought to be an aggressive target a year ago.

We did this while driving significant product transitions, going after new markets and product areas, and best of all, while aggressively moving the whole company to open source software (leading me to hope we can officially put to rest the question, "how will you make money?").

It is extremely frustrating to me that public companies must deal with putting their fate in the hands of a group of analysts who have such limited understanding of the ecosystems of information technology. Wall street has been so timid about Sun since the bubble burst, largely because their fear of the past clouds their ability to see the future (or the present, for that matter).

Today Sun has the best product portfolio I've ever seen. They also have the financial metrics to prove their strategy is good. I have invested more than ten years of my life in their products, and I can say with no hesitation that I plan to continue that investment for the next ten years as well. The only question I have is when the rest of the industry will catch up.