In my Sunday column, I take a look at Sun Microsystems, the Rodney Dangerfield of Silicon Valley stocks.

The company was the ultimate high-flyer during the dot-com bubble, crashing when the bubble popped. But unlike those Internet companies based on a dumb idea and too much cash, Sun is a real company with real products and a real customer base.

After drifting for a few years, management got its act together and the company is slowly recovering. 

But so far investors lack faith that Sun will really make a comeback. The stock has vastly underperformed competitors like Hewlett-Packard, IBM and even Dell.

That has led Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz to take two steps that are purely cosmetic: changing the stock symbol from SUNW to JAVA (which I blogged about earlier), and asking shareholders to do a one-for-four reverse stock split to instantly quadruple the stock price (while reducing the number of shares to one-quarter the amount now).

Those are tactics more often associated with shaky companies making a last-gasp attempt to save themselves, not solid companies like Sun. Sun is underselling its strengths.