Sun’s Chief Executive Tweets His Resignation
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
On Jan 27 he tweeted a link to "likely my last blog at Sun" - http://twitter.com/OpenJonathan/status/8312583611
And that blog made it clear that with the Sun / Oracle transaction having closed he was on his way. Even that's hardly news - you can't really have two CEOs, so someone was always losing that title, and Sun was the one taken over.
"Twitter bullying! New phenomenon! Be afraid."
"Guy dumps his wife on twitter!"
"Man finds his long lost son via a tweet"
"How a startup was born out of a single tweet"
"How terrorists are now using twitter to coordinate attacks"
I think the problem is that some people view twitter/internet/latest big thing to be mysterious/worrying/game changing. It rarely is. Also of course some people just see <hyped keyword> and assume it's amazing new news unprecedented.
"A thing of beauty / trampled by a philistine / he blames all but self"
It's his fault that Sun was vulnerable, that it's market share eroded, that its product line was not competitive and so on. Sun was indeed a thing of beauty. Its fate is a sad thing and the fact that things like these happen diminish us all.
I once met some SunSpot developers at a conference (perhaps it was a Maker Faire?) and I asked when the Spots would be for sale. One of the developers explained that they had a warehousefull, but had a lot of problems getting organizational agreement on how to sell the units (they aren't servers, etc.) They eventually found they could sell them the way the company sold t-shirts. $500 t-shirts, anyway.
tl;dr: company can't sell things even when they want to.
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/05/16/sun-honeymoon-update...
How many things must have gone wrong so that a config UI requiring a non-obvious, redundant magic string could have gotten out the door?
Edit: The "jumped the shark" moment was when, at JavaOne, Sun claimed it would build the world's largest app store by installing nagware along with the JVM.
The 17 syllable thing is more of a guideline. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_in_English
Apologies for nitpicking, the bigger story here is obviously the resignation of the CEO of Sun rather than the manner in which he did it.
And also, not to forget, the common form of response.
(For one thing, your notion of a syllable as an English speaker is related to the mora Japanese counts by, but they're not the same thing, even when counting for corruptions of English words. Patrick is 2 syllables, パトリック is 5 mora. This means every haiku you've ever heard much longer than is "acceptable", for a certain very proscriptivist form of "acceptable".)
This is a topic of accidental interest to me because one of my undergrad theses was on autogenerating haiku. (If there were a Turing test for haiku, one my program wrote is better than anything I've ever written. The next hundred were crappy. The great thing about it as a CS problem is that haikus force the reader to do so much of the work that as long as you have a good dictionary of seasonal terms to work with mashing a few of them together may actually result in something pretty, even with a very minimal understanding of grammar.)
Financial crisis / The last nail in the coffin / CEO no more
It seems disingenuous to blame the fall of a company that's been floundering for a decade on the present climate.
* they sold SUN/Solaris servers, until the market started preferring cheap x86 stations with Linux installed
* while their moto was "the network is the computer" since before anyone saw that, they failed to ride the cloud ... it happens with companies way before their time
* they had a great start with Java applets but they weren't a company of creatives, like Macromedia/Adobe, and so they missed this opportunity
* Eclipse and the whole open-source community around Java practically took away their ability to sell any Java related tools
Open-sourcing Java was a good decision ... it was out of their control anyway. Open-sourcing Solaris was also a rational decision ... who would've used Solaris when Linux gives you almost everything Solaris does, and for free too?
Open-sourcing Netbeans was the only way to compete with Eclipse ... look at IntelliJ ... even they decided it's not in their interest to keep the core closed.
What they failed to do is to monetize these freebies with complementary commercial products. JavaFX is free? Cool ... why not sell a tool for designers that competes with the Adobe Flash environment?
Solaris is free? Cool ... sell kick-ass development / management tools that are only available for Solaris.
They also had the resources to pull something like Amazon's EC2 or Google's App Engine ... based on Solaris, Java and MySql. I wouldn've liked that, but they didn't
Instead their bet was on support contracts. But big enterprises that go for this are going with IBM instead, which has a lot more resources. And small companies prefer to get their support from free online help channels, like IRC/mailing-lists.
They were late to the cheap-desktop-running-linux party, but they could, arguably, build inexpensive desktops had they given up the idea of building desktops as if they were tanks. I bet they could build SPARC servers at Dell prices, if they wanted to have Dell quality.
"* they had a great start with Java applets but they weren't a company of creatives, like Macromedia/Adobe, and so they missed this opportunity"
To be fair, Macromedia bought a small startup FutureWave. Adobe bought Macromedia. Microsoft embedded Flash in every copy of Windows and rode it's monopoly to it's own.
"* Eclipse and the whole open-source community around Java practically took away their ability to sell any Java related tools"
Still, their C++ IDE is top-notch.
Open-sourcing Solaris may help fragment the Unix market and help drive it towards standards (as opposed to Linux being the de-facto standard)
JavaFX is free because nobody would buy it anyway. Network effects make Flash's stronghold nearly unassailable. Even Microsoft is having trouble with it.
"They also had the resources to pull something like Amazon's EC2 or Google's App Engine ... based on Solaris, Java and MySql. I wouldn've liked that, but they didn't"
Like the Sun Cloud Compute Utility?
And buying MySQL was downright stupid. In more civilized societies a CEO who pulls a stunt like this would be in prison.
I think they tried - if you look up Schwartz's blog from a couple of years ago, he was making the argument that you should buy computing power like you buy electric power ("Chief Electricity Officer", I think he said ;-).
I suppose they just could not execute/sell.
P.S. Five years ago, actually: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/looking_back_on_commodit...
It's what happens when management falls so much in love with the idea that they never touch the execution.
Oracle, IBM, HP, Apple, etc are not going out of business in this economy.
Investing billions to give software away (Java, MySQL, NetBeans, etc) in some far-fetched hope that it would cause customers to buy extremely expensive systems hardware didn't work, and everyone seems to know this but Schwartz.
I really don't like this guy.
Software and Hardware, Complete
this Sun never saw
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Bye bye Jonathan
Hi ex-playboy Ellison
IBM, HP?