The Economist ran a bit of a report card for the high tech industry this week, stating that results are mixed. Some companies seem to be doing well, but there are plenty of others that are still down in the dumps.

Sun’s travails make sense to me — I honestly think Sun is going to have a very hard time in the future. Sun’s best technology, Java, is free. I don’t see Sun making any money off of it in the years to come. (On the other hand, Java is a bell cow for IBM, BEA, Borland, and plenty of other companies.) How Sun managed to create this great language, and a fine industry around that language, and yet not turn it into a profit center is baffling. I don’t see there being great growth in the market for Solaris boxes, myself. Linux keeps storming ahead — where I work we use Linux for almost everything on the server side, running on nice, rack mounted Dell servers. Despite the occasional confounding kernel bug, it has worked out really well for us. Since we don’t need big iron, there’s just no reason for us to look toward Solaris.