Schwartz was elevated last Friday to be president and COO of Sun, the job last held by Zander, who is now CEO of Motorola.

Loiacono, who's been at Sun since 1987 and was once the company's chief marketing officer, has recently been in charge of the strategic direction of Solaris, Linux and the Java Enterprise System stack under Schwartz.

Meanwhile, Rich Green, the VP of Sun's Developer Platforms Group who testified in Java's defense at Microsoft's antitrust trial and was involved in creating the expected Java Studio Creator, a Java version of VB, has left Sun reportedly to go to a two-month-old outfit started by another Sun veteran.

Sun said Green's departure has been in the works for some time. It denied talk that he was leaving "in disgust" over the Microsoft deal or that he was passed over to replace Schwartz. It said both he and Loiacono were approached about the job, but Green was already on his way out. He reportedly stuck around to see the Microsoft deal through to announcement.

Rick Ross, head of the Java Lobby, said, "Despite the best efforts of Sun's PR team to minimize the event, I cannot see Rich's exit as an unrelated or inconsequential occurrence."

Chris Atwood, director of engineering for Java tools, will replace Green temporarily.

Included in the announcement was a canned quote from Loiacono saying. "We will build on our new collaboration with Microsoft and plan to provide the most Microsoft-interoperable software available." Maybe Loiacono can get revenues out of Sun software, Schwartz certainly didn't.

• Loiacono Becomes Sun's New Exec VP of Software