Sun Microsystems is vanishing on Thursday. That's the day that shareholders will assemble in Santa Clara to vote on the acquisition by Oracle. I'm not expecting any turmoil or difficulty for the board of directors: Sun's stock has been sinking more reliably than Old Faithful in recent years. The company has tried everything it can think of to save shareholder value, but nothing has worked. Not even changing the ticker symbol to JAVA and consolidating shares to raise their prices. Sun says three are more milestones along the garden path, but the real symbolic end is this Thrusday.

It's sad, and yet, it's also a sign of hope. Thinking that Sun could soon be part of a larger whole is somewhat comforting, when you consider that the alternative was for this beheamouth of a company to lumber on down the road, dribbling useless products from almost every orifice. Even when Sun did create a worthwhile product, its sales people seemed to be some of the least effective in the business. There's certainly something to be said for the soft sell, but when we're dealing with large technology companies staffed with some of the most vicious and dedicated sales people in the world, soft sell doesn't usually work.

So it is with a heavy heart that I write this preliminary obituary for Sun. I've been covering them since 2005, and I must say, it's been interesting. During this time, the company struggled desperately to reinvent itself as an open-source software company and a storage powerhouse. But in every case, Sun couldn't move quickly enough, nor could it generate enough sincerity to convince the zealots.

After all, Sun practically invented cloud computing with its Sun Grid offering after the turn of the millennium. Of course, Sun is also the perfect example of a pioneer getting scalped. Kind of like DEVO.

So long Sun. I'd say we hardly knew you, but I think we actually knew you all too well.