Author: geoff

Goodbye to friends

A sad day here at Sun, as the previously-announced layoffs (involuntary severance, reductions in force, downsizings, pick your euphemism) started to take effect. On some previous occasions I have been a manager, and have therefore had some insight into how the process unfolds. This time I was just another individual contributor, and had no advance warning of any kind. The managers and HR department are (unfortunately) getting quite good at this kind of thing – it’s not a skill that I would wish them to cultivate.
I have no particular wish (nor, per Sun’s Policy on Public Discourse, would it be appropriate) to discuss the business issues surrounding the layoffs. Nor is it time to discuss the consequences of all of the project changes and cancellations that accompany a RIF, although some of my colleagues whose blogs are syndicated on PlanetSun have done so. Instead, this evening I find myself thinking about the friends and colleagues whom I will miss going forward. The familiar (if distorted) face at the other end of a video conference. The presence on the mailing list always ready with a sardonic quip or a helpful suggestion. The now-empty office that used to be a rendezvous when I travelled out to Menlo Park or Santa Clara. (But not empty for long – space consolidation will swallow up empty offices rapidly.)
Tonight I’d like to thank all of the people that I’ve worked with over the many years that I’ve been at Sun, particularly those who are no longer with the company and whose departure was involuntary. I wish you were still here. You know who you are.

On my next vacation

DisneyWorld is totally passé (whether in Florida, France, or Japan). I want to go to Suoi Tien Park! Or I do if it’s as much fun as it looks from the web site. I’m particularly interested in the Unicorn Palace with Hell Ten courts inside, a unique and magnificent way of education for people. I understand that this incorporates ten highly imaginative kinds of hell, designed for people guilty of different kinds of sin – shades of Dante. I’m not clear on how interactive the experience is….

Book chain

“The crew numbered nearly a hundred and served a dozen or so guests, who had come from Britain via Paris, where they had stayed at the Ritz.” From A Peace To End All Peace by David Fromkin.
Posted in accordance with Dave’s instructions:

  1. Grab the nearest book,
  2. open it to page 23,
  3. find the 5th sentence,
  4. post its text along with these instructions,
  5. point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads.

Spring cleaning, and a whiff of nostalgia

A little while ago I posted my thoughts on spring cleaning and how best to avoid it. Well, today it finally caught up with me, and I decided to take a hard look at my closet. At the back, neatly arrayed on hangers and covered with tissue, were all of my oldest Sun t-shirts, dating back to 1985. The collection included a dozen different shirts for PC-NFS, dating from 1986 (“PC-NFS: More fun in the Sun”) to 1996 (the tenth anniversary of the first customer shipment). Some were a bit threadbare,a few had yellowed with age, some of the silk-screening had faded….
Also in the stack was the notorious “grilled chameleon” shirt. Way back in the early 1990s, a little software house called NetManage was going around claiming that it had invented a bunch of PC networking technologies. Those of us that had actually done the invention (from companies like Sun, FTP Software, Beame & Whiteside, and Microsoft) were more than a little ticked off at this. So the guys at B&W came up with a shirt showing a bunch of geeks (tolerable likenesses, actually) barbecuing a chameleon, which was NetManage’s logo. We all signed copies of the shirt, and a couple were raffled for charity.
[Note: I just checked out NetManage’s website, and they are still repeating the lies about their involvement in the Windows Sockets work. Just for the record: the authors of the WinSock spec were Mark Towfiq (then of FTP), Martin Hall (JSB), Dave Treadwell and Henry Sanders (both Microsoft) and myself (Sun). We started by considering the implementations from our four companies, plus that of NetManage. The result was different from all five. There never was any “reference implementation”; interoperability was worked out at a series of multivendor testing sessions. The engineers from NetManage admitted that their claims were baseless, but told us that Zvi (the founder) insisted on them. Sad that one of the first genuinely collaborative initiatives of the Internet era should be turned into a pissing contest. Oh, well.]
Anyway, enough with old shirts that I’ll never wear. Out they all go.

CNN's rules of engagement

I just finished reading P. W. Singer’s fascinating article Warriors for hire in Iraq, and the follow-up piece Outsourcing the war. I strongly recommend that you take a look at both of them.
One particular paragraph caused me to look twice in disbelief:
Each firm determines its own standards and procedures, and there is no formal regulation or even an industry self-regulatory mechanism to establish them or to police and punish those who fall below standards. While the best firms will blackball rogue or incapable employees, the industry has grown so huge and the clients remain so clueless that such tagging offers minimal recourse. For instance, industry insiders could only shake their heads when one firm invited CNN “Crossfire” talk-show host Tucker Carlson to ride along on a mission into Iraq. Not only did the firm’s personnel give the conservative pundit an AK-47 to wield in the middle of a volatile war zone, but when they needed gas, Carlson and crew took over an Iraqi gas station by holding local civilians waiting in line at gunpoint. (One hopes he wasn’t wearing his trademark bowtie, which would have only added to the local insult.) Carlson described the incident with proud delight in Esquire magazine, apparently not understanding the multiple industry sins that had been committed.
Hmmm. This is CNN, not Fox. I wonder if CNN has any comments on this kind of behaviour by their “journalists”. I shall ask them.

Are there any rules about blogs?

In a long thread of comments attached to my recent posting about Easter, I ventured an opinion that this thread was closed, that I didn’t think blog entries should generate permathreads. Susan expressed good-natured frustration and asked if there were any rules about such things.
Rules in the blogosphere?
Well, the blog owner presumably has a say about how his or her resources get used. I don’t think by allowing comments a blog becomes a common carrier or anything like that. As for the thread in question, I guess I could simply ignore it and let others use it to discuss the topic. I know at least one Sun colleague who makes a point of posting infrequent, thought-provoking articles and then never contributing to the follow-up discussion. Personally I’d rather be discussing what’s happening to the company that’s such a big part of my life (Sun), or pondering depressing questions like this.
In general, a blog reaches a narrower audience than a mailing list. A comment thread on a particular blog entry reaches an even narrower audience: those people who read the blog and are sufficientlyinterested in the top-level entry to dig into the comments. It seems an oddly unproductive use of one’s time to post lengthy contributions which so few people will read, and even more unproductive if you have reason to believe that the blog owner (the one reader you can count on) won’t be sympathetic to your thesis.
Finally, you can always start up your own blog, write an article on your favorite topic, then post a comment to my blog referencing that article. That way, people who really want to debate the symbolic meaning of nails in the Crucifixion can go hog wild, while I can move on to something more important, like whether painting your roof white can save you big bucks on air conditioning….. [Another gem from those good people at BoingBoingBlog.]

Back to the Future

On April 4 I posted a piece in which I discussed my reactions to the Sun-Microsoft deal. This week I was in California for meetings at the Sun Menlo Park campus when the news broke about the big reorg. As the dust begins to settle, I thought I’d blog my initial reactions to this. After all, I’ve been at Sun nearly 19 years, and it’s a big part of my life.
First, let me summarize the announcement (since some journalists still couldn’t get it right even after the press flash, the analysts’ call, and widespread discussions). Before this change, Sun was organized into a number of business units. ESP built mid- to high-range SPARC servers; VSP built low- to mid-range servers based on SPARC, Xeon, and Athlon processors, as well as SPARC workstations; PNP designed SPARC chips (fabbed outside); NWS did storage systems; SW did software: Solaris, Java, middleware, desktop, N1, identity, embedded.
After the change, NWS and SW are essentially unchanged (so far). Throughput Systems absorbs ESP, PNP, and the SPARC-based products from VSP. Network Systems gets the Xeon and Athlon lines from VSP, plus the Kealia acquisition. My guess is that Nauticus will also go into NS, though I haven’t seen anything definitive.
My thoughts on all this. First, I think it’s a step in the right direction. In the past, there have been charter issues about exactly where ESP and VSP should draw the line: now we’ll have a single division responsible for a (hopefully simplified) range of SPARC based products. The big debate about the roles of MPs versus blades in systems remains – after all, it’s not just a Sun thing – but it should be easier to get the balance right when it’s not seen as a turf issue any more.
Second, I want to understand exactly what the NS value proposition is. The announcement talked about low-cost horizontally scaled systems with off-the-shelf components that leverage industry economics. Does that mean a low-margin model, or a high-value one? If the latter, there needs to be a substantial investment in software to complement the off-the-shelf components. Does all that get done in SW, or should we split SW and move certain pieces into NS?
We’ve tried various ways of organizing SMI over the years. I regard the new structure as SMI 4.0. Here’s the taxonomy:
SMI 0.x: The original Sun with Scott, Vinod, Andy, Bill and the small gang of obsessive crazies who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer and got Sun off the ground. Led to…
SMI 1.0: when Bernie Lacroute came on board in 1984. Strong, relatively centralized engineeering and operations, with Bernie as effective COO. In this period we laid the foundation for real growth: SPARC, the AT&T deal to unify Unix, strong engineering processes under Rob Gingell. This was also the era of the 386i workstation (with which I was involved), and the infamous “Larry Garlick Memorial Decision” not to get into the router business. I think the last of these may have been one of the things that precipitated…
SMI 2.0: The era of “The Planets”: a core computer business (SMCC) surrounded by a number of independent business units: SunSoft, SunConnect, SunPics, SunSelect, and so forth. I remember Fortune magazine hailing this as the breakthrough model for the 1990s. It allowed us to enter and exit certain markets fairly painlessly – who remembers SunPics, the Sun printer business? – but it confused customers, because each BU had its own sales force and we couldn’t coordinate the customer-facing activities. Plus each BU was really very independent, and there were armies of people doing nothing but negotiating intra-Sun transfer pricing. (There’s a lesson here for bureaucracies that try to achieve efficiency though “internal markets”: they don’t work.) So during the 1990s there was a gradual shift to…
SMI 3.0: The defining characteristic of this version of SMI was the move to a single sales force. Because this changed the nature of the BUs, and led to a degree of functional rationalisation, it was tempting to see functionalism as the driving force, but it wasn’t. Behind the single sales force, the various BUs remained (?fiercely) independent. And the functional organization was never as total as it might appear. Scott might tell me that he’d “put all of software under Jonathan”, but these days engineering is software, except for a bit of physics, and there was (and is) software development going on all over Sun – appropriately so. The fact that Zander was COO for a while, and a few high-profile people came and went, and we went through the bubble, didn’t really change this model. But the decision to put Jonathan Schwartz in as COO, and his “activist” managerial style, definitely signals a shift, to…
SMI 4.0: Maybe this should be SMI 3.1 instead, but never mind. This model has a strong Back To The Future feel: Jonathan Schwartz gets to play the part of Bernie Lacroute. One sales force, internal units organized for operational efficiency and execution rather than along business lines.
It’s never boring.

Music for flying

Just flew down from Seattle to San Francisco. Due to ATC restrictions at SFO, we left late and had to hold for a couple of orbits at Point Reyes. This gave me the opportunity to listen to one of the best bands you’ve never heard of: Family. English, hippie, musically eclectic. They released a couple of brilliant albums at the end of the 1960s called Family Entertainment and Music From A Doll’s House. A couple more albums followed, but IMHO they never recaptured the genius of those first two. Anyway, those two albums have been released as a double CD, and I have them on my iPod. Listening to Processions and Face In The Cloud while gazing down upon beautiful Point Reyes was delightful. (And the former seemed so apposite – how far I’ve come from the teenager who first listened to that record in my student dorm at Essex University all those years ago.)
Anyway: highly recommended.