Sun's top brass get golden parachutes...

...all we got was this old T-shirt

As top Sun execs get ready to deploy their golden parachutes as Oracle prepares to devour the company for a mere $5.6bn in July, someone is about to make a killing on T-shirts.

Paul Humphreys has reminded everyone in his blog at Sun about Network, a faithful hound who got things for you when you needed them and who was for a number of years part of Sun's marketing campaigns. (I often wondered about the wisdom of the phrasing "the network is a dog" when you were trying to sell the idea that "the network is the computer".)

At least my tail is real.
(Click to enlarge)

Anyway, what was old at Sun at a few years ago seems to have been the sales strategy that Jonathan Schwartz used to peddle Sun up and down Silicon Valley and around the world. All you have to do is scratch out computer and replace it with company, and you've pretty much got Sun's corporate strategy right since last November.

Maybe instead of keeping Network in a kennel in Menlo Park and trotting him out for adverts they should have let the pooch run the company. The real question, of course, is whether or not the Sun division of Oracle will be more like the Network of old or Old Yeller. If you see Larry Ellison carrying a rifle... ®