Innovation Loves a Crisis

I thought I'd share a note I sent earlier in the week to Sun's leaders - about the turmoil we're seeing in the markets, and how I want our team focusing their efforts.

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Begin forwarded message:
From: Jonathan Schwartz
Date: September 30, 2008 12:02:29 AM PDT
To: All Sun
Subject: Headlines, Financial Crisis, etc.

You can't have missed today's headlines - the American Congress failed to pass a critical bill authorizing the Treasury to put a floor under the US banking sector. The market swooned, and politicians in the US, and across the world, are bickering over the right long term answer - jump in and take action to save the troubled institutions, or step aside and let the market sort it out. Several more banks/insurers were shuttered or bailed out today - I'm confident we haven't seen the last of these collapses and rescues.

And I know there are questions about "how does this affect Sun?" Well, I believe almost all our core customers will be affected - not just the banks, but the telcos, hospitals, media companies, construction firms, airlines, governments, startups, you name it. Every customer that depends upon credit as a means of financing their business - whether it's a university or a Fortune 100 transportation company - is going to be under severe stress.

It's also going to create a huge opportunity - if we're on offense. Not on defense, not worried about the impact on Sun, but driving the outcomes for Sun's customers and shareholders.

And here are a few important things to remember.

1. Our customers look to technology as a means of driving value and productivity.

You're not going to hear from any of our customers, "let's stop buying technology and hire more people to do the work." They're going to default to the opposite - automating work, and finding answers and opportunities with technology, not headcount. And in that process lies an opportunity for Sun - to engage with customers in driving down cost, driving up utilization, and driving the changes that yield immediate and long term benefit. The right question for every customer you meet is - "how can I help?" I assure you, they'll have ideas for us. And we have no shortage of ideas for them. Personally, I'm reaching out to customers and partners just to check in and offer help - I'd recommend you do the same.

2. That said, we are aggressively expanding our customer base.

Our concentration in financial services and telecommunications is exactly why we're working so hard to expand our customer base. We're dramatically underpenetrated in the global market - and that represents a great opportunity. I need every executive to think seriously, esp. in the market-facing portions of the organization, about growing our current relationships and growing new customers. The 'and' is important - growth matters in both contexts.

And why do I think we have permission to grow new customers?

3. Because innovation loves a crisis.

Remember the bursting of the internet bubble? The initial wave of open source adoption followed that collapse some six or seven years ago. That same zeal for breakthrough, game changing economics is back with a vengeance - and this time, Sun's positioned as the single biggest potential beneficiary. Want proof? As companies move to lower the cost of proprietary database vendors, their number one choice is: MySQL. The number one choice to lower spending on proprietary storage: ZFS with OpenStorage. How will the proprietary alternatives fare against xVM? Glassfish? Lustre? OpenSolaris? Same, from where I sit. There's opportunity everywhere I look.

We can, and should, be on offense across the board. From our newest Batoka and M-Series SPARC systems, to our newest Constellation Intel and AMD blades, from our network identity offerings (talk about automating labor-intensive processes!) to leveraging our amazing SunRay thin clients, or our PS and Support Services capabilities - we have the most powerful offers we've had in years. Imagine if our portfolio had been this strong when the dot com bubble burst - we'd have swept the floor, and been in a dramatically different spot.

Which is all to say, there will be no end of opinions surrounding what the US, or the EU, or the Asian governments should be doing to bolster economic performance. I'm not that interested in the public debate - I am infinitely more interested in the private debate - going on inside every one of our customers surrounding "which OS will we pick?" "What's my open source strategy?" "How can I radically reduce spending on proprietary storage?" "How can I save on power and space?" Which vendor understands my problems?" "Which vendors are asking if they can help - which are truly my partners?"

In times of crisis, we have a big opportunity to stand apart from our peers, to be better connected to the market, even if it's in turmoil. Yes, our customers are going to be under stress, but that's simply another way of saying "open to change." And I want Sun to be the company engaging them in the transition - with our ideas and our roadmaps. The door is open.

And yes, we will see some customers disappear - we will also see many emerge even stronger. And the market, as it's done for the past 30 years, will return to growth - led by the companies that took advantage of the downturn to become even more valuable, to grow even faster.

So I want to assure you, we are watching the market very carefully, to understand the impact on Sun, and the challenges in front of us - on a macro and micro level. But I and my leadership team know the drill, we've seen this before when the last bubble burst - *now is the time* to get in front of the opportunity, and firmly establish new ground. Now's the time our customers will be most open to change.

Let's be sure we're there to help - and to take advantage of the opportunity.

Jonathan

Posted on 03:42PM Oct 02, 2008 | Comments[30]

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Saving a Fortune in Data Warehousing

UPDATE at bottom.

I just wanted to extend my congratulations to the team at Greenplum, and our joint customers at Fox Interactive Media - the folks behind MySpace, Photobucket, IGN, FOXSports.com, and a whole series of web properties that together represent one of the single largest audiences on the web.

All three of us announced today that Fox is running a massive production data warehouse built atop Greenplum's data warehousing software on Sun's Solaris/ZFS based OpenStorage platforms (a sea of Thumpers, to be specific). That is to say, open source software is at the core of one of the world's largest - and most affordable - data warehouses.

Fox joins a series of joint Sun/Greenplum customers, from LinkedIn to the New York Stock Exchange, in looking to open source databases and innovation as a vehicle to drive better insight, faster decisions and more efficiency.

Which is to say, customers that are tired of proprietary vendors with a knack for raising license fees during economic downturns have a clear set of remarkably affordable alternatives. Based on commodity economics everyone can understand.

Congratulations to all involved!

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UPDATE: I've gotten a fair number of inquiries from folks wanting to know how the Greenplum/Thumper data warehouse discussed above prices out against its competitors - given that one recently announced proprietary entrant has suggested $15,000 per terabyte is acceptable to customers. My view is that's a pre-bubble price, and roughly an order of magnitude too expensive in today's market - and unlikely to garner more than headlines. But that's obviously a biased view, I'd check with a few customers to find out what they want to pay.

Posted on 11:59PM Sep 24, 2008 | Comments[27]

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Of Wine, Virtualization and xVM

A few years back, I remember sitting with a group of customers talking about wine, and virtualization (a natural pairing, if ever one existed). Wine, because we were at an event Sun was hosting in Napa Valley, the heart of California's wine country - virtualization, because the attendees were data center professionals who'd come to talk about the future.

The customers in attendance all ran very high scale, high value data centers, who would deservedly respond to the accusation that they "hugged" their servers with "and what of it?" They were the individuals who kept some of the world's most valuable systems running with exceptional reliability.

But they were all starting to see and worry about the same thing, running applications in "virtualized" grids of networked infrastructure ("cloud computing" wasn't yet in vogue, or I'm sure someone would've used the term).

Now, virtualization is a simple concept with a fancy name (abbreviated to "v12n" by the cognoscenti - by that method, I am "j14z"). It's simply slicing up physical computers into many smaller "virtual" computers, each of which can be outfitted with its own OS and application stack.

That is, not only does a virtualized computer take on the task of running multiple OS's (running atop a hypervisor, described below), but the OS's themselves might change over time, responding to load or schedule. The traditional view of "computer A runs OS/Application B" can now give way to a more responsive "these computers are available for high priority work," without regard to operating system or architecture. A spike in on-line shopping might reallocate more "virtual" machines to transaction processing during peak shopping hours, shifting to a different OS/app stack when the frenzy dies down. Capacity moves from fixed to fungible.

Although desktop virtualization wasn't the focus of these customers, most live in a world with multiple desktop OS's, too - it's not that they all (like me) run five different desktop OS's, most don't - it's that they have multiple generations of Windows, or no longer have the source code to legacy applications, a condition that dictates you keep old OS's (and hardware) around. Desktop virtualization enables users to run multiple OS's side by side on a single desktop, and divorces software upgrades from hardware upgrades (an innovation keeping CIO's and developers smiling).

Back to the datacenter, virtualization can enable extreme infrastructure consolidation - decoupling applications from hardware drives more efficient capacity planning and system purchases. And as exciting as that was to everyone, if things went wrong, you could also tank the quarter, blow those savings and end your career. So, why all the anxiety?

If I could sum it up, these customers worried that virtualization would dissolve the control they'd carefully built to manage extreme reliability. In essence, they could hug a virtualized mainframe or an E25K (hugging is the act of paying exquisite attention to an individual machine), but it's far harder to hug a cloud. Nor can you ask a cloud why it's slow, irritable, or flaky, questions more easily answered with a single, big machine.

As the wine soothed their anxieties, a few of them began to draw out their vision of an ideal cloud environment (our laptops were open to take notes). Summarized, here's what they wanted:

Extreme diagnosability. Datacenter veterans know that things rarely run as planned, so assuming from the outset you're looking for problems, bottlenecks or optimization opportunities is a safer bet than assuming everything will go as expected. They all wanted ultimate security in responding to the question "what if something goes wrong?" - their jobs were on the line.

Second, they wanted extreme scalability - they all believed the move toward horizontally scaled grids (lots of little systems, 'scaled out'), would give way (as it always does) to smaller numbers of bigger systems ('scaled up'). We're seeing that already, with the move toward multi-core cpu's creating 16, 32, 64 even 128 way systems in a single box, lashed together with very high performance networking.

But scalability applies to management overhead, as well - having 16,000 virtualized computers is terrific (like 16,000 puppies), until you have to manage and maintain them. Often the biggest challenge (and expense) in a high scale datacenter isn't the technology, it's the breadth of point products or people managing the technology. So seamless management had to be our highest priority, with extreme scale (internet scale) in mind.

They wanted a general purpose, hardware and OS independent approach. That is, they wanted a solution that ran on any hardware vendor they chose, not just on Sun's servers and storage, but Dell's, IBM's, HP's, too. And they wanted a solution that would support Microsoft Windows, Linux and not just Solaris. Ideally embraced and endorsed by Microsoft, Intel, AMD, and not just Sun.

And finally, they wanted open source. After years of moving toward and relying upon open source software, they didn't want to reintroduce proprietary software into the most foundational layer of their future datacenters. Some wanted the ability to "look at the code," to ensure security, others wanted the freedom to make modifications for unique workloads or requirements.

And with that feedback, the answer to the above seemed obvious to one attendee, "why can't you guys just use Solaris?" They all ran Solaris in mission critical deployment, all appreciated its performance, they loved the diagnosability (via delivered via DTrace), and the capacity to scale to the largest systems on earth. It was the perfect answer until one of the customers asked, "do Windows customers want to run Solaris? I don't think so." The "Solaris" brand didn't convey OS neutrality - and that neutrality was core to what we were thinking. But we knew the underlying inventory of OpenSolaris innovations would certainly give us a fabulous headstart.

That's the rough backdrop to what drove our virtualization announcements last week - a desire to solve problems for developers and datacenter operators in multi-vendor environments. If you look to the core of our xVM offerings, you'll see exactly how we responded to the requirements outlined above: we integrated DTrace for extreme diagnosability. We leveraged the scale inherent in our kernel innovations to virtualize the largest systems on earth. We've built a clean, simple interface to manage clouds (called xVM OpsCenter, click here for more details), to address management and provisioning for the smallest to the largest datacenters. And everything's available via open source (and free download), endorsed by our industry peers (watch these launch videos to see Microsoft and Intel endorse xVM - no, that's not a typo, Microsoft endorsed xVM). We even leveraged ZFS to get a head start on storage virtualization (the next frontier).

And why call it xVM? To make sure everyone knew we weren't simply targeting Solaris - xVM virtualizes Microsoft Windows, Linux (Ubuntu, RHEL, all other distros) alongside Solaris (8, 9 and 10). Customers can consolidate those operating systems, and similarly consolidate their hardware infrastructure - and use xVM OpsCenter to manage and maintain the whole plant.

This week, we're unveiling a full line of desktop to datacenter virtualization offerings, covering desktop virtualization (xVM VirtualBox), datacenter virtualization (xVM Server), high scale management (xVM Ops Center), and Virtual Desktop support (xVM VDI and SunRay). All endorsed and supported by the industry, and all in use by some of the most powerful customers on earth.

And to that end, I'd like to offer my thanks to the customers who were present at that event a few years ago, and offer my sincere congratulations to the teams involved in bringing xVM to market, across Sun and our partner community.

With all the celebration around xVM, perhaps our next customer event should be held in Champagne...

Posted on 10:34PM Sep 14, 2008 | Comments[34]

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Fanning the Winds of Change in Storage

It's been over a month (and three hurricanes in America) since I've posted a blog. More than a few of you've noticed - thanks for the prodding...

It's been a busy summer, on nearly every front. Customer activity hasn't slowed down, and the good news surrounding the (otherwise unfortunate) economic crisis embroiling many customers (especially those in the financial services industry, a heavy concentration for Sun) is that it's whipping up the winds of change. Customers facing spending pressure, or tiring of vendor price increases have new options, and there's a new appetite to explore those options (nothing like mandates from the CEO to reduce spending by 50%).

One of my more interesting recent meetings wasn't with a customer, though, it was with an equity analyst from a global financial institution. Equity analysts publish research that feeds the investment community - their (free) research and financial analysis accompanies buy/hold/sell recommendations to investors (who hopefully generate trading fees for the analyst's employers).

This one analyst hadn't historically followed Sun, and was in the process of developing his first rating. He wanted to focus on our storage plans - more and more of the customers whom he interviewed were focused on storage, and many were talking up a specific open source software technology: ZFS. (Before meeting with me, he'd talked to colleagues in his own IT shop, and was impressed to find some who admitted to running ZFS at home - nothing like touching your customers where they live... if you'd like to have ZFS sent to you, click here or on the LiveCD shown at right.)

Granted, you can see an increasing focus on storage at Sun - the acquisition of MySQL is as much a storage acquisition, as an enhancement to Sun's developer offerings. Discussions of flash memory, the economics of archiving, the Lustre parallel file system, all point to an increasing focus on what Sun sees as an exceptional opportunity for customers (and thus, investors). Storage and computing are converging - and we're about to bring the trends that transformed the server industry a few years ago (mass engagement in open development communities, and scale achieved via clusters of commodity parts vs. proprietary technologies) to the historically closed and proprietary storage industry.

Now, the notion of "engaging customers in open development communities" doesn't sit well among some traditional storage analysts (or our competition) who believe "Storage is too mission critical to tolerate open source software." Although I appreciate that wisdom and experience, I think the market's more nuanced than that - mission critical environments don't tolerate unsupported software, true, which is why we offer 24x7 commercial support for ZFS (on Sun hardware, and Dell, even). But broad global adoption of key open source projects will continue to drive change deep into the world's datacenters. Gartner's prediction that 90% of world's companies will run open source software didn't specify where they'd be running it - "everywhere" is the safest bet.

But back to the equity analyst - he patiently asked, "Great theory, but when will you see revenue results?"

"Last year," I responded. "You're seeing it accelerate."

As many folks know, we shipped our first ZFS based storage systems in 2007 - known as Thumpers. Thumpers finished up this last year generating around $100m in billings, up 80% year over year. From a capacity perspective, we delivered roughly 90 petabytes of Thumper storage in FY2008, to some of the most demanding storage installations on earth (up ~200% y/y). What's fueling the growth? Adoption of ZFS is a clear driver (this chart gives you a sense of where we're seeing adoption - thus revenue opportunity). But ultimately, customers are recognizing they can save money, space and power. Thumpers are roughly twice the capacity in half the space at half the cost of the competition - $1.20/Gigabyte. (They also run Windows and Linux with the same hardware economics).

Now, our view is "OpenStorage" (systems built from commodity parts and open source software) will grow far faster than the proprietary storage market. We plan on driving that growth, and over the next few months, you'll see a tremendous amount of storage innovation targeting the growing breadth of customers wanting better/faster/cheaper/smaller options. Expect to see flash, zfs, dtrace, and good old fashioned systems engineering play a very prominent role in an aggressive push into the storage market.

And in case you missed our announcement last week, our progress was validated by industry analysis - IDC said customers are growing their disk storage business with Sun far faster than with any of our proprietary competition. And at three times the rate of the overall market's growth. A great place to start.

If you'd like to know more, and might be interested in taking a Thumper system for a free trial run, just click here and pick the country in which you're located. We supply most systems at Sun for free trials across the globe (yes, we even cover shipping to you). If you like the system, please buy it. If not, we'll take care of getting it returned to Sun, you owe us nothing. (That's the closest we can get to free hardware downloads...)

As I said to the analyst, you need only look to the results we're already delivering to see the linkage between open innovation and revenue growth. ZFS won't transform demand for our legacy products, but it'll certainly transform the opportunity and industry unfolding before us. But don't just get our opinion, the best folks to validate our approach aren't at Sun, they're among the storage buyers finally feeling the winds of change - at their backs.

Posted on 08:20PM Sep 07, 2008 | Comments[24]

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MySQL Wins at LinkedIn!

I was with a customer last week, who leads technology and operations for one of the world's largest companies. We were talking through his priorities for the upcoming year, and on a page filled with various traditional priorities (consolidation, energy management, disaster recovery, regulatory compliance) were two interesting words.

"Open Source."

I asked what that meant, why it was there. He said they'd done an audit of the firm's development activities, and found an overwhelming number ("hundreds") of open source projects that had been completed behind the scenes, beyond management's oversight. The projects were designed to solve problems deemed too expensive or difficult to solve with proprietary technologies - from meeting a tough budget, to automating a new process. And rather than fight the trend, they figured it was delivering real benefit, something to explore more fully. And they were asking for Sun's help.

I'm seeing this with nearly every customer I meet, the invisible hand of open source - communities of individuals equally devoted to their employers, and to personal and peer productivity. These communities, within companies as well as across industries, are solving problems without having to involve procurement (while religiously adhering to policies surrounding privacy, intellectual property protection and software licensing). They're delivering unquestionable value.

Now, is unprescribed technology usage all that unusual in the workplace? I don't think so - it's similar to choosing your favorite search engine or social network, choices we all make (even CIO's) without purchase orders, that definitely bear on workplace productivity. Most progressive CIO's are trying to embrace this trend rather than fight it, figuring out how they can mandate as little as possible, not as much as possible - selecting only the most critical policies and standards to drive efficiency or compliance.

The invisible hand of open source adoption is definitely changing IT, and it's changing Sun's market opportunity - in software, servers and storage systems. Before Sun acquired them, MySQL had already established themselves among the world's open source communities, and invisibly penetrated an enormous breadth of companies across the world. From where I sit, the acquisition changed MySQL's standing not so much among developers, but among traditional technology decision makers - by bridging the divide that separated them. A well adopted product became a safe choice for enterprise deployment. The acquisition opened new doors and business dialog - we've seen a substantive increase in sales and download activity since it was announced. We've also seen a fair number of CIO's, as above, asking their teams - "where are we using MySQL?" The answers are always interesting.

As those conversations transition to sales cycles for MySQL Enterprise subscriptions (for those seeking mission crtiical support, eg), the number one question I get asked by traditional customers has become... "...but does MySQL scale?"

And there's no better way of putting that question to rest than citing the global businesses powered by MySQL - at least one of which is often used by the very individual asking the question: LinkedIn. Click here to read how Sun and LinkedIn are working together to serve one of the world's largest, most valuable, and fastest growing social networks - at truly global scale.

At the pace LinkedIn is growing, they will be managing services to far more accounts than most of the world's banks... and building exceptional value along the way. (And if you haven't signed up yet, you really ought to...)

Posted on 01:05PM Jul 29, 2008 | Comments[37]

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Solaris on Wall Street - Faster and Faster

I remember a dinner I had a while back with the CEO of a global financial services firm. As one of his first acts as CEO, he'd cancelled an enormous outsourcing contract, and I'd asked him why - his response has stuck with me. "Banking is a technology business. Pure and simple. I can't win if I don't have my own team."

Independent of his views on outsourcing, I've heard the same point made by many (but not all) financial services executives - banking (like big swaths of telecommunications, media and retailing) has become a technology business, where every ounce of performance and differentiation matters. Even, and especially, in the midst of market turmoil.

Which is a fitting backdrop for a joint press release we just issued with Intel - in which we achieved a land speed record - a million messages per second, running the Reuters Market Data System on Solaris 10 for Intel silicon (see release for details). To our colleagues at Intel and Thomson Reuters... thank you! Performance = market advantage, energy savings, or datacenter consolidation  - or all of the above. Customers get to pick.

And following up on my last post on the impact of flash memory and ZFS on the world of datacenters, our own Adam Leventhal has added a far more fulfilling technical perspective in Communications of the ACM: Flash Storage Memory.Worth the read...

Posted on 12:16AM Jul 03, 2008 | Comments[22]

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Anything But a Flash in the Pan

There are only two kinds of storage devices - those that have failed, and those that are about to fail. That's the view most datacenters have about the traditionally mechanical devices pejoratively referred to as "spinning rust." All disk drives fail, cheap drives fail faster.

If the average time to fail is five years, you and your laptop can make do with the occasional backup. But when an average enterprise has 100, or 1,000, or increasingly 10,000 or 100,000 individual disk drives, failure is a daily, if not hourly occurrence. Mechanical devices fail.

And with failure comes the potential for losing data - using commodity disks to save your boss $500,000 does her no good if she's fined $50,000,000 for violating data retention regulations. Stock transactions, medical images or feature length movies - take your pick, some data has to be perfect. Not a decimal point or pixel out of place.

That's exactly why, years ago, Sun invented a storage platform called ZFS. ZFS makes a powerful assumption - that a reliable system must be built from unreliable parts. By using surplus computing cycles, ZFS constantly runs powerful integrity checks, giving data corruption no place to hide. With ZFS, customers can use the cheapest disks and simplest systems, and get exceptional data integrity, along with massive reductions in cost and complexity.

But there's a new option on the table, known to many by the memory cards they use in their phones, iPods or digital cameras - called Flash memory. Flash is very fast at reading and writing data, like DRAM (the memory chips in your computer). Its price sits squarely between DRAM and traditional disk drives. But unlike either alternative, Flash requires no power to remember data. And with the price of electricity escalating across the world, keeping 10,000 disks spinning at thousands of rpm can cost you in power what you pay for your storage. Power has become the dominant factor in high scale hardware decisions - and Flash is set to disrupt the industry.

Historically, there have been two impediments to using Flash in the enterprise.

The first was cost. Flash is more expensive per gigabyte than a comparable disk drive. But with every increase in the cost of electricity (and decay in the price of Flash memory), Flash's relative cost per available gigabyte is quickly improving - remember, disk drives have to be powered on to be available. And although a gigabyte of mechanical disk might cost you less than a gigabyte of Flash memory, the latter is at least an order of magnitude faster in reading and writing data - so the cost per gigabyte served is exceptionally low.

But simply introducing Flash as yet another tier of storage in a datacenter isn't the real opportunity - that adds new costs and a set of new management hassles. To truly change the industry, adding Flash would have to be completely transparent to users and operators, alike, with no switching or operational cost. And that's exactly what we're doing with ZFS. ZFS will transparently incorporate Flash into the storage hierarchy of a running system, using the microprocessor cache for the most performance sensitive tasks, DRAM for the next, then Flash, then disk (then ultimately tape). ZFS will allow Flash to join DRAM and commodity disks to form a hybrid pool automatically used by ZFS to achieve the best price, performance and energy efficiency conceivable. Simply put, our storage and server systems will get enormously faster - without any upgrade to the microprocessor. Adding Flash will be like adding DRAM - once it's in, there's no new administration, just new capability.

That's one reason we're so excited by Flash - the cost per available gigabyte served (the total operational cost of storage) plummets with Flash in the mix, especially for data or performance intensive applications (like MySQL, Postgres, Oracle or SQL Server). From the right systems designs, Flash has the potential of providing orders of magnitude improvements in economics and performance - and with the advent of Sun's xVM hypervisor, we can bring this performance benefit to any host operating system (running atop xVM, Windows operators can inherit the benefit of ZFS+Flash, too). 

The second problem is trickier - simply put, although Flash memory can be read an infinite number of times, writing to Flash more than a few hundred thousand times can wear it out. Now, most normal humans will never hit 500,000 writes in a digital camera. But you might in your enterprise. What to do?

Again, ZFS to the rescue.

ZFS treats Flash memory like any other storage medium - remember, all storage devices fail - and manages data integrity whether failure's induced by a bad hard drive motor, write-fatigue or a hammer drill. Increasingly sophisticated "wear leveling" algorithms are also maximizing Flash lifespans - evening out write activity to avoid hot spot failures. But the bottom line is this - with ZFS at the helm, wear is a non-issue (on hard drives or Flash - they both have wear limitations, after all).

These are the premises behind Sun's systems approach to Open Storage. We're integrating ZFS, Flash memory and some exceptional hardware/silicon innovations to deliver high performance, low power, general purpose storage and server appliances - accelerating any software that runs on our SPARC or x86 systems (MySQL users, in specific, will see a big turbo charge). For a fraction of what proprietary NAS storage ordinarily costs. Expect our first Flash systems to ship toward the end of this calendar year.

And as you might expect, ZFS and all the underlying software will be free without commercial support - OpenSolaris, ZFS, MySQL and Postgres are already available (click the image at left to get a free LiveCD - or check out Apple's release of ZFS in Mac OSX). Software revenue will come from those enterprises that want Sun's technical support for mission critical deployment. On the hardware side, Sun's Try and Buy programs allow any partner or customer to order one of our systems for free 60 day trial - if you love it, buy it. If not, we'll cover the return postage.

If the above doesn't make it obvious... our view is Flash is anything but a flash in the pan - as the price of power continues to increase, and the price of Flash continues to plummet, the combination of Flash, ZFS and true systems innovation will have an even bigger impact on datacenter economics than virtualization.

It's that big a deal.

---

UPDATE:  You may have seen we added yet another company to the list led by Intel, IBM and Dell supporting Solaris (and thus ZFS) as OEM partners - this morning, we officially announced the addition of Fujitsu-Siemens. Congratulations, all...

Posted on 03:00PM Jun 10, 2008 | Comments[41]

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Growing in the P7 (not just the G7)

De facto standards are the only ones that matter.

That's a bit of a truism in the technology world - well intentioned standards bodies and departments of justice can do their best, but at the end of the day, volume deployment is the only setter of standards. Ubiquity trumps policy, just about every time.

To that point, I was on a panel recently, discussing the impact of technology on the world's more rapidly developing economies (what's often referred to as "BRICA," or Brazil, Russia, India, China and Africa).

One of the speakers referenced an interesting shift in the traditional media industry: western companies were turning their attention toward the developing world. GDP growth wasn't drawing their attention - as much as demographics. Teenagers and those in their early twenties represent the biggest media buyers in the world, spending a greater portion of their income on music, movies and entertainment than any other age group. And the majority of people fitting that age profile live, by definition, in population centers - not in the US, UK, or Germany, but BRICA. Whose collective population represents nearly half the entire planet's. Think of the Ovum analysis from the New York Times, pictured on the right, more as growth in media outlets - and remember, more people in the world see "the internet" on their phone, than on a PC.

The impact of that shift in buying power won't be limited to traditional media. The software industry is a media industry, as well - technically, the two have fully converged (a digital file is a digital file, whether it's OpenSolaris, MySQL, a new Jay Chou video, or a champion cricket highlight). The infrastructure to distribute and manipulate that content (eg, servers, networking, storage and infrastructure software) is increasingly geared to serve consumers - the "business to consumer" (or, B2C) segment of the IT marketplace is growing far, far faster than "business to business" (B2B). And where will the market for such network computing infrastructure be largest? By definition, where the markets are centered - near consumers (more than half of whom now live in urban environments, well covered by mobile network service). If B2B caused the IT industry to concentrate in proximity to economic centers (the G7), B2C focuses our attention on consumers and population centers (the P7?). That's a profound change.

So with that backdrop, I've made a few significant changes to how Sun's organized, focusing leadership and resourcing around two new areas.

First, as many folks know inside of Sun, I announced the addition of Lin Lee to my staff, to manage relationships with governments and NGO's across the world. Based in Shanghai, Lin will advocate Sun's vision of sustainable network infrastructure, encompassing open source and document formats to power efficient datacenters - we've already found a very receptive audience in emerging economies. Lin's focus will be helping students, universities and governments to lower the barriers to indigenous opportunity.

I also announced today a new leader reporting to me for Sun's Global Sales and Services organization, Peter Ryan. He's also added to his staff a new business region, Emerging Markets - with a new leader (Denis Heraud). Emerging Markets, representing a basket of rapidly developing economies (BRICA included), will be a peer to North America, Europe and Asia. Last quarter alone, our BRICA business grew in double digits - this change is designed to accelerate that growth by adding new focus, resourcing and strong leadership.

Peter (who disclosed to me only this weekend that he started his career as a mainframe systems engineer!) replaces Don Grantham. (Don's leaving Sun to help HP secure a Solaris license before their EDS transaction closes...)

Rapidly developing economies have, of late, started throwing their weight around in the world of traditional IT standards - and have been among the most assertive in embracing and deploying free/open source software. Quite naturally, they've also been among the most concerned about sustainable technology practices: 100,000,000 new PC users, each drawing 200 watts, certainly paves the way for social and economic progress - at the cost of ~20 gigawatts of new coal fired power plants. Now you know why our SunRay desktops, at 4 watts apiece, have been of such interest in the developing (and developed) world.

Bluntly put, we're elevating our focus on developing economies because that's where free software, and Sun's businesses, are growing fastest. Where is OpenOffice deployed in the greatest numbers? In places where saving $300 per desktop is meaningful.

No wonder those economies are so passionate about open standards - their citizenry will ultimately make them the most important decision makers in the world.

Posted on 01:26PM Jun 02, 2008 | Comments[36]

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Transparency and Making Choices

Not long ago, I was sitting across from the CEO of a media company. He showed enormous pride in the social value of his organization - in delivering news to the world via a global team of thoughtful, award-winning journalists.

He asked what made me proud to be at Sun. Among a number of things, I said I'm proudest of the role Sun plays in making sure stories like his are told - "Our technologies, after all, are how your journalists file their stories, and we play a central role in how you present them to the world via the network." I am unreservedly proud of Sun's role in making the world a more open, transparent place.

Beyond professional journalism, the network is a social utility for the world's citizenry - whose digital cameras and cell phones and blog postings and emails form a tidal wave of transparency. We live in a world whose traumas and triumphs are visible instantaneously. Sunlight's not just a great disinfectant, it's a wonderful safety net, too - you can't fix the problems you don't know about. But once you know about a problem, even small attempts to help, multiplied over the long tail of the internet, can make an extraordinary difference.

Over the past few days, the world has watched an earthquake in China lead to the death and dislocation of countless thousands. The San Francisco Bay Area, where Sun is headquartered, has felt the impact deeply - beyond co-workers, friends and family, we've suffered our own traumas with earthquakes. A cyclone in Myanmar triggered similar thoughts among those of us effected by hurricanes in New Orleans, Louisiana.

But the world's an increasingly transparent place. And any help, from $1 to $1m, multiplied over the world, makes a difference.

Which is why I'm sending personal funds to the relief organizations I trust to bring aid to those stricken.

And I'm encouraging you to take the time to make a similar choice.

Posted on 09:09AM May 18, 2008 | Comments[39]

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JavaFX as Rich Internet Application Platform

JavaOne wrapped up on Friday. We hosted individuals from across the globe, and from every industry: consumer electronics and gaming, to enterprise IT, space exploration, factory automation, the automotive industry, academia - like the network itself, Java delivers something for nearly everyone, everywhere.

This year's biggest announcements centered around Java's role in the future of rich internet applications (or RIA's). What's a rich internet application? It depends on your perspective - from mine, it's any network connected application that persists in front of a user, typically outside a browser, that can operate when disconnected from the network.

On the one hand, I'd claim Java's always been a RIA platform - before the world really wanted one. Early Java applets delivered interactivity, but at the expense of development complexity and, in the early days, performance - when a browser, and more recently Javascript, would suffice.

But browser based applications are hitting complexity and performance limits, and content owners are striving for higher levels of engagement (via high definition video, or advanced interactivity). Developers are demanding something new - the browser's a wonderfully accessible programming model, but it's a weak deployment model for rich/disconnected applications.

An unspoken driver of RIA is also business model evolution - many companies behind rich applications are seeking independence from browsers and search engines, whose default settings and corporate parents present a competitive threat. There's a growing appetite for locally installed applications that build rich, direct and permanent engagement with consumers. No one wants to pay a toll to meet their own customers.

With that in mind, as we looked to reinvent the Java platform, we heard a consistent set of requirements. And not just from coders, but from sports francishes seeking to directly engage their fans, media companies wanting to bypass browser defaults, to artists and businesses and device manufacturers - everyone's looking to uniquely engage consumers via the network. These audiences have nearly identitical requirements for a RIA platform - they want technology that:

• Reaches every internet consumer - on desktops, mobile, and new devices, too.
  
• Delivers high performance - and the ability to engage creative professsionals in the design process.
  
• Leverages existing skills and enterprise infrastructure.
  
• Is totally free, and open source.
  
• Provides content owners with control and ownership of their own data.
  

At JavaOne last week, we addressed every one of those issues - here's how:

First, RIA developers want to reach every consumer on earth, and on every device.

Why? Because the market is in front of consumers - no matter what screen they may be using. Desktop, mobile phone, personal navigation, digital book - you name it. The market's in front of all the screens in your life, not just a PC.

That said, on PC's alone, Java's popularity has grown in the last few years, as measured by runtime downloads - we routinely download 40 to 50 million new Java runtimes a month, and update more than a billion every year. The adoption of the Java platform exceeds the adoption of Microsoft's Windows itself - Sun's Java runtime environment (JRE) is preloaded on nearly every Windows machine (from HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc.), but also runs on Apple's Macintosh, Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSe, Solaris and OpenSolaris desktops. In addition, a JRE is present on billions - yes, billions - of wireless and mobile devices, from automobile dashboards and navigation devices, to Amazon's Kindle (did you know Amazon's Kindle is a Java platform?).

Which is to say, the Java platform reaches more people than any other software technology the world has ever seen.

Second, RIA developers want performance, functionality AND simplicity.

Why? Because content owners and application developers want to engage consumers - and want to engage artists and creative professionals in the workflow.

Java's history with simplicity isn't perfect - which is why our teams have rewritten the applet model, and focused so intently on making the new consumer Java runtime environment (download a beta version here) exceptionally fast to load within a web page, exceptionally performant for complex interactivity, and trivially accessible to consumers. We've also simplified Java with a scripting language, JavaFX script, that enables creative professionals to engage with coders to create immersive experiences, while embracing the creative tool chain (from interaction design to pixel manipulation) used by the worlds designers and digital artists.

And I'm really pleased we've solved the desktop installation problem, by making JavaFX applets separable from a web page with a simple drag and drop (click the image above to watch this demonstrated). Developers can now bypass the browser to trivially install apps on desktops - once the applet's dropped on the desktop, content owners have a direct relationship with their consumers.

You might have also seen that we're adding full high quality audio and video codecs to Java on every platform on which it runs - resolving another gap for RIA developers, support for time-based media (click here for a demo of high performance video).

Third, enterprises want to reuse their existing Java skills and assets in moving to RIA.

Nearly every enterprise employs programmers with Java skills - it's still the number one internet language taught across the world, and found pervasively in global business infrastructure. As businesses move to engage their customers via RIA platforms, reusing existing skills, and connecting RIA's to existing systems, gives the Java community a unique ability to build from what exists - rather than attempt to replace it.

This familiarity also allows businesses and developer teams to focus on engaging with consumers - rather than irritating IT with new infrastructure requirements (JavaFX developers simply link to existing enterprise infrastructure, vs. requiring new systems for RIA apps).

Fourth, RIA developers want free and open platforms.

Why free? Because developers don't want to encumber their applications with royalty bearing dependencies, or use technologies that predefine where consumers might appear. You don't build developer communities around closed source, you build user communities - and this is an instance where developer selection and adoption will define the broadest RIA marketplace. JavaFX will, like all of Sun's software platforms, be made freely available as open source, and it'll be released via the GPL (v2) license.

And lest you think free and open software is the province of those with goatees and tattoos... we're seeing a rising tide of developing nations mandating free and open software in government and academic procurement. Why? To protect choice, and build indigenous opportunity - there's no reason to build dependencies upon proprietary software if you can avoid it.

Lastly, lets face it, the real value in Web 2.0 is the data - not the app. And that data is YOURS.

If you've been watching the social media space as carefully as we have, you understand the value of instrumentation and intentionality in building a business on the web. Knowing what users are doing with your product, whether it's a fantasy cricket league or a consumer banking application, enables more innovative business models, the delivery of higher value services, placement of more valuable ads - data allows for better decisions, and better value creation (and bluntly put, higher CPA).

But most rich internet applications are built, then deployed - into a fog. Developers who leave the confines of the browser either lose access to information about what their users are doing, or have to rely upon a technology provider that's inserting itself into their data stream. And some of those technology providers compete with content developers.

With a project code named Project Insight, we'll be instrumenting the Java platform to enable developers to harvest the data stream generated by their RIA content. JavaFX developers can focus on their business models - rather than enhancing someone else's.

_______________________

With all that said, what's the success of JavaFX worth to Sun?

By definition, it's worth more to Sun than the adoption of someone else's platform (known as "positive option value") - and the proprietary infrastructure used to serve it (don't forget, RIA's have rich internet back-ends (RIBs?). And in the RIA world, all the options are going to be priced at free, anyways - this isn't a contest to be won on price.

From where I sit, the platform likely to win will be the one that sets developers free - to pursue markets, opportunities and customer experiences as they define them, not as vendors define them. Now, setting developers free - that's where we can excel. It's in the DNA of everything we do.

For developers, learn more at JavaFX.com. And be sure to check out NetBeans - like Java itself, it's starting to rock the free world...

Posted on 10:59PM May 13, 2008 | Comments[41]

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OpenSolaris, Amazon, MySQL and Glassfish... Clouds Parting

We made some big announcements this week at our annual developer forums, CommunityOne and JavaOne. I thought I'd highlight a couple in particular.

We announced the first commercial release of OpenSolaris - targeting high speed developers and development teams (not consumers...). OpenSolaris focuses on developers wanting to be freed from proprietary software models, who see innovation and automation in operating systems as a source of competitive advantage.

If Solaris 10, OpenSolaris's older brother, is for IT departments prioritizing carrier grade stability over rapid innovation, OpenSolaris targets the exact opposite - developers, from high performance computing to social networking, that prioritize a constantly refreshing repository filled with community innovations (and ZFS-based automated rollback) over an unchanging qualification target. Go to OpenSolaris.com to download a free copy, or click on the OpenSolaris logo to have a bootable CD delivered to you (free of charge). Or if you want a simpler way of trying it out... just go to Amazon!

We also announced a partnership with Amazon, through which we've made OpenSolaris, alongside MySQL and Glassfish, available with commercial support on Amazon's elastic computing cloud. From where I sit, this is a profound change in the industry - the world's most popular database is now available, and commercially supported, as a cloud service. As is the fastest growing Java container, and a redefined OpenSolaris for the modern world.

The traditional software industry, first revolutionized by open source, next by software as a service, is now embarking on a third revolutionary change... infrastructure as a service.

Sure feels like the clouds are parting.

(And again, if you'd like a free copy of OpenSolaris sent to you on a bootable, "live" CD, just click on the OpenSolaris logo above.)

Posted on 10:32AM May 08, 2008 | Comments[34]

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Our Q3

We announced the results of our third fiscal quarter (Q3) on Thursday last week, and the results weren't what I, or any of us, wanted.

As you can read in the press release, we delivered $3.267 billion in revenue for Q3, roughly flat with a year ago. On that revenue, we delivered a GAAP loss of 4 cents (equal to the charge associated with the acquisition of MySQL, which closed within the quarter) - on that revenue, we generated around $320m in cash.

The low light of the quarter was revenue in the US - which declined year over year by nearly 10%, a big step down for a geography that typically contributes 40% of our total revenue. The highlight of the quarter was our India performance, up 30% year over year - and our chip multi-threading Niagara systems, which grew (billings) 110%.

We had growth in 12 of 16 geographies in which we sell, but a shortfall in the world's largest economy (and the largest in Sun's portfolio), is tough to make up elsewhere. So we showed no growth at the corporate level.

Despite a weak US economy, we still see growth and opportunity across the world. We are going to be making some changes as a result of the quarter, certainly, but not in our core vision or strategic direction - network infrastructure is being built out across the world, developers will continue to define its architecture and shape demand, and we will continue to position ourselves to drive and capture that market.

With that, I'll go through a few questions:

What happened in the US?
Late in the quarter, we saw a fairly aggressive slowdown - among smaller customers, and for larger systems (like enterprise servers and large tape libraries). As you recall, we left Q2 with a healthy backlog, lots of momentum, and feedback from customers that we were totally on the right track, so we were as surprised as anyone that deals started stalling in early March.

Why did big systems slow?
It's counterintuitive, but larger systems and purchase orders's are easier to slow down than smaller purchases. When you sell the systems and storage behind a big buildout, it's typically a long selling cycle, and a fairly long implementation process (systems aren't powered up the day they arrive). So holding off for a few weeks, either because you're spooked about the US mortgage crisis or because your CFO decided to put a pause on capital spending, is fairly straightforward.

And remember, our business is a portfolio - from high growth, low end blades and training services, to slower growth, high end enterprise systems an infrastructure software. There is no one system or product for all workloads, it's a portfolio.

So how are you going to adjust going forward?
We'll continue to diversify our business - geographically, and with the introduction of our Open Storage initiatives this past week and acquisitions like MySQL and Vaau, we'll continue moving into adjacent markets.

We also announced a restructuring plan, through which we'll be making targeted reductions in operating expenses. The net result will be the elimination of up to 2,500 jobs.

To be clear - we are taking assertive, and prudent steps to focus on growth opportunities, and to pull our cost structure in line with our business model. As we've done in years past, we're doing both - making choices to invest and disinvest.

Evolving companies are never done making choices.

Where did you grow in the quarter?
In 12 of the 16 geographies we serve - including India (up 30%), Brazil (up 20%), up in China, Russia, the Middle East, Canada, to name a few places. In general, the world continues to look to technology as a source of growth, automation and efficiency. Even our Wall Street business was up this past quarter.

On the product front, our focus on energy efficiency continues to pay off, with Niagara systems grew (billings) 110% year over year, and our newest (AMD, Intel and SPARC) blade systems growing at an even higher clip. The MySQL team delivered a great growth quarter, and Service revenues were up 3% (a major portion of which are software related, of course). Disk storage billings were up 6%.

Deferred product revenues were again up nicely, more than 25% - these deferred revenues tend to be for higher end systems and more complex configurations, with gross margins above the corporate average. Deferred Services were down, attributable to the ERP transition I mentioned earlier (we expect to recover that in Q4).

What didn't go well?
Enterprise systems, which were great growers in Q1 and Q2 (20% and 8% growth, respectively), were down in the quarter - and not specifically attributable to competition. We saw exceptional performance on our APL systems built with Fujitsu, and a strengthening partnership. Tape libraries were also down, although media sales were strong.

Given the size of both these line items, our higher volume lower end businesses were not yet at a sufficient scale to eclipse the slowdown on the lower volume, high end systems.

Why don't you just stop giving your software away?

Because we prioritize developer adoption. Let me give an example.

Last week, we saw a very high profile media company raise a considerable sum of money. They had not otherwise been on our radar. I sent a note to the head of our global sales team, given the fundraising had cited a growing infrastructure buildout, and asked if we'd made contact.

He said no, but we were immediately reaching out - and it turns out they're completely built around MySQL.

So before we arrived, before we were engaged, and before they began building out a large infrastructure, the MySQL team had scored a design win - ahead of the proprietary competition. What should we have charged them beforehand? No matter what it was, they wouldn't have used the product - startups and developers don't pay for software. But here's a diffrent question: what would we have paid them to select MySQL over the proprietary alternatives before embarking on a massive expansion?

Right question. We didn't pay them, the MySQL team earned their adoption.

Will they buy a license now? Maybe not, but we'll be well positioned if and when they, like Facebook or Nokia or the New York Times, do. And in the interim, it costs us nothing for the reference. I was with a bunch of startups at our StartupCamp this morning, and asked how many folks in the audience *didn't* use free software... no hands were raised. Why are we focused on startups? Because we're focused on all developers, in big companies and small.

How do you feel about the competition?
Just fine, we looked at the deals slowing in the US, competition wasn't our big issue - it's not that someone else was getting the purchase order, it's that no PO was being issued in the quarter. We're more exposed to the US markets, and potentially more exposed to discretionary purchases (although I don't really believe that servers are more discretionary than storage - they're converging). Avnet, one of our big distributors, had a similar experience in the US.

Why didn't you pre-announce the quarter?
We wanted to be sure, when we made our announcements, to have finalized our numbers and our plan to adjust our cost structure going forward. Given we're in the midst of an ERP transition, we were still finalizing work late into April. Secondarily, we needed to review our FY 2009 restructuring plan with the board before going public. We announced as soon as we'd met, reviewed and approved the plan.

How did you lose money compared to a year ago profit?
Well, although we generated a lot of cash in the quarter (more than $320m from operating activities), we also incurred a number of charges which reduced our net income. These included non-cash items related to stock-based compensation and amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets as well as other acquisition-related charges - all of which added up to 20 cents worth of charges.

Are you repurchasing your own shares?
We don't comment on buyback plans, but we'll report any potential purchases at the end of the quarter.

When will the US recover? Will the malaise spread overseas?
We build network innovation at Sun, we don't predict the global economy.

And with that, you've hopefully got a clearer sense of what we saw, and what we see. So I'll end on a particuarly vexing question,

"Why does Sun's CEO waste time writing that blog?"
Because I believe in providing clarity surrounding our strategy and operations - not just once a year in the Annual Report. I believe clarity behind our direction is useful for our shareholders, customers, partners and employees.

In good times, and in challenging ones.

________________

Safe Harbor Statement

Jonathan's blog contains forward-looking statements regarding the future results and performance of Sun including statements with respect to the effects of our restructuring plan, and expectations for deferred revenue. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and actual results could differ materially from those predicted in any such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in such forward-looking statements include: risks associated with developing, designing, manufacturing and distributing new products; lack of success in technological advancements; pricing pressures; lack of customer acceptance of new products; the possibility of errors or defects in new products; competition; adverse business conditions; failure to retain key employees; the cancellation or delay of projects; our reliance on single-source suppliers; risks associated with our ability to purchase a sufficient amount of components to meet demand; inventory risks; and delays in product development or customer acceptance and implementation of new products and technologies. Please also refer to Sun's periodic reports that are filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2007 and its Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarters ended September 30, 2007 and December 30, 2007. Sun assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update these forward-looking statements.

Posted on 03:47PM May 04, 2008 | Comments[68]

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Freedom's Choice

Today is the opening day of the MySQL User Conference - so I thought I'd describe a recent customer interaction related to the acquisition.

A few weeks ago, I was visiting the Chief Information Officer of a large commercial institution. He had with him the company's Chief Technology Officer, Chief Information Security Officer (known as the "see-so"), and a series of lieutenants from various parts of their (large) development organization.

The Sun team had spent the day reviewing our progress together, and was finishing up with a product roadmap presentation. From what I sensed, it'd been a good day, so when I arrived, it was mostly to say thanks for the business, and ensure everyone had my contact info in the event I could help out going forward.

We had just closed the acquisition of MySQL, so before I wrapped up, I asked, "And would you like a quick update on the newest addition to our family, MySQL?"

The CIO responded categorically with "we don't run MySQL, we run [name withheld to protect the proprietary]." The CISO said, "We can't just let developers download software off the net, you know, we've got regulation and security to worry about." The CTO smiled. Everyone else appeared to be sitting on their hands. I was going to leave it at that. Thanks for the business.

Until a (diplomatically) assertive Sun sales rep piped up, "Um... no, I connected with a buddy of mine over at MySQL, and had him check - you've downloaded MySQL more than 1,300 times in the last twelve months."

After a profoundly awkward silence, one of the individuals from their internal development team piped up, "Actually, everybody uses it. Why bother hassling with license agreements when MySQL's got you covered. We're stoked you bought them."

Awkward silences aside, we've now got a very productive engagment with the customer around delivering commercial support on a global basis to what's turned out to be the most popular database inside their development shop. They're finding more and more applications for MySQL, and more ways to save significant time and money in moving toward the future.

And that experience - of a CIO not knowing how ubiquitous and valuable free software has become to their organization - isn't atypical. In fact, it's the norm, and a divide we're gently trying to bridge.

Opportunity's everywhere.

So is free and open software.

They might even travel in pairs.

Posted on 01:14PM Apr 14, 2008 | Comments[42]

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Which is the Real Poisson D'Avril?

If you'd like the backstory on the April Fool's video making its way around Sun (below)... it goes like this.

My normally trustworthy administrator let me know I had a lunch appointment with my normally trustworthy friend, Ted. So I went to a normally trustworthy restaurant, where the normally trustworthy host walked me to my table - and past a series of video cameras I foolishly didn't notice. Ted lets me know he's managed to connect with Dan, a normally trustworthy colleague, who's put him in touch with a technical expert I might be interested in meeting.

Ted lets me know the guest is flying up from Los Angeles. And that he's been in an accident that might impair his ability to speak. Pay special attention at minute five, marking the first time I've seen anyone make a chicken out of a dinner napkin.

Let me be the first to point out that the video shown was highly edited. The good (and, notwithstanding this prank, normally trustworthy) people who edited the footage exercised appropriate restraint for a global audience unaccustomed to diluvian drooling. How uncomfortable was it at the table? Having watched the unedited version with a Sun colleague before it was posted externally, she remarked, "Look how well your Mother raised you, you didn't even stare."

On a far more civil note, Sun's headquarters were also attacked by a herd of squeaky dolphins yesterday, swimming in formation from right to left... rumor has it they were on their way to meet with a representative of their community who now leads our database business.

Oh, and Bill Macgowan is still at Sun.

I hold him personally responsible for my designation as the real poisson d'avril (dolphins aren't fish, after all, they're mammals), and I'll forever view him with a lingering suspicion... but he's still here.

Posted on 02:44PM Apr 02, 2008 | Comments[19]

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Give it Back.

As you know, Sun's open source software and microprocessor strategy has been, at times controversial. We've filled trade journals and chat rooms with all kinds of dialog and the occasional crackpot conspiracy theory.

As many have rightly assumed from the outset, that controversy was, in fact, not a byproduct of the strategy - it was the strategy: if you're talking about Sun, you're not talking about the other guy. And then you'll buy a datacenter.

But now that we've firmly established our reputation for open source leadership, I'm very worried there's no more controversy to be had. There's too much trust in the system, and too much clarity around our strategic intent. So it's getting tougher and tougher to kick up a storm - and we can't very well spend a billion dollars or change our ticker symbol every time we want to generate a headline. Now can we?

So today I'd like to unfurl the second chapter of our strategy.

We want you to give it all back. You couldn't possibly believe we'd let you keep it, did you?

We specifically request that all free software originally distributed by Sun Microsystems, related to software or microprocessors, including but not limited to source files, binaries, derivatives, extensions, applications, patents, patent applications, copyrights, ideas, thoughts, and derivative thoughts, along with any and all mirrors thereof, be returned immediately.

In addition, (we know this is the risky part, but we need to get the privacy advocates twittering, too), we demand all data processed, stored or created by such intellectual property, up to and including all data held within file systems, databases or open source productivity applications be returned, as well. Up to and including the book report your kid just typed on OpenOffice.

We'd like to request this all be returned within thirty days.

Thank you for your understanding.

______________________________

And although it pains me to say this, we do live in a litigious society, so: YES, this is an April Fool's joke, as defined by relevant sections of the United States Securities Act of 1933.

Posted on 12:35PM Apr 01, 2008 | Comments[36]

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