The question has been asked before, but the issue has new urgency now for investors in Sun Microsystems Inc., who have seen their stock tread water over the past year even as other big-name tech stocks have roared higher. Sun, which rose to prominence selling pricey computers to dot-coms, financial services and telecommunications companies during the boom years of the late 1990s, is aiming to get back on the growth track. "I think the puck is coming to where we are," McNealy, who is an avid amateur hockey player, said in an e-mail to Reuters.
The company has reinvented itself before -- transforming from a workstation specialist to a full-fledged computer systems provider in the early 1990s. But this time, while it has made impressive cost cuts and has more than $5 billion in the bank, year-over-year revenue growth has yet to return. In fact, Sun has so far suffered more than rivals International Business Machines Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. during the three-year-long technology downturn. Over the past 12 months, Sun shares have lost about 2 percent even as IBM has gained 21 percent and HP investors have been rewarded with a booming 58-percent return.