Category: Sun

In his blog today, Jonathan responds to a frustrated developer who wanted to take advantage of the advertised deal on our new workstations:

an Ultra 20, fully loaded with Solaris, and the entirety of our Java developer platform and runtime infrastructure for $29.95/mos – and get the hardware for FREE”

…only to find that when he tried to order it, the actual price was $360/yr. (Not a big deal for most people, but it would be for some – and more to the point, it wasn’t what had been promised.) Jonathan’s mea culpa explanation: it was…

because our internal ERP systems were implemented at a point in time where no one could imagine a Sun product with a monthly price vs. an annual price

And even though it would be nice if this kind of thing didn’t happen, the alternative is worse. People at the cutting edge – with products, developer initiatives, solutions – should always be pushing the envelope, challenging what the traditional corporate processes and infrastructure can handle. Personal case in point: when I joined Sun back in 1985, all of our products were hardware boxes. I don’t think we even had a software product on the price list (except perhaps a 3270 terminal emulator – different world, eh?). My team created PC-NFS, the first NFS client solution for DOS-based PCs. (This was before Windows; back then Bill Gates was hot for Xenix!) In June 1986 we shipped our first revenue units, and within a few days the first customer service call came in.

I’ve got a question about this PC-NFS product I just received.

Certainly, sir. Can you tell me the serial number on the box?

Er… OK, there’s a license number printed on the label on the software box – is that what you want?

No, sir: I need you to tell me the system serial number of your Sun computer. It’ll be next to the power switch.

But I’m trying to install PC-NFS on a Compaq Deskpro.

I see. Well, perhaps you can give me the serial number of the file server.

That won’t help. The file server is a Pyramid system. We don’t have any Sun hardware at all.

I’m sorry, sir: without a system serial number I can’t log your call.

!@#?<>*&%$#!

The rest of the support network was in place: we just hadn’t got around to changing the front-line process. And nobody had envisaged the possibility of selling Sun software into an account without any Sun hardware. (Sounds familiar, Jonathan?) In any case, the support process was straightened out with commendable speed. Should we have held up product shipment until all the infrastructure glitches were worked out? No way.

We just announced that we’re buying StorageTek. Over the years Sun has bought a number of companies, but this is a new scale of acquisition for us. StorageTek is a 7,000 person $2.2B company that was founded in 1969 – the year after I got into the computer business, and 13 years before Sun was established. Integrating the two corporate cultures is likely to be challenging – and stimulating – for all concerned. Nevertheless this feels like the right move for Sun.

I just received an email beginning:

Dear Geoffrey:

Congratulations on your 20 years of service with Sun!

In recognition of this milestone, we are pleased to offer you an award for your contribution and dedication to our company. To view your award options, please visit the website below. [Etcetera.]

Who’d have thunk it? [And come to think of it, where did that expression come from?]

I remember one hot summer day going to see Barry Folsom at the Sun sales office in Waltham. Barry had just been hired by Bernie Lacroute to head up the planned-but-as-yet-unstaffed East Coast Division of Sun. I asked Barry if his job offer was still open (he’d tried to hire me into the Rainbow group at Digital); he responded by asking me if I had any thoughts about how to accomodate IBM PCs in this new Network File System stuff that Bill Joy, Bob Lyon and Rusty Sandberg had come up with. “Yeah, I think so; I’ve been looking at NFS for our [Mosaic] OS,” I mused, and the rest is history.

One of my favorite ex-Sun execs seems to have been ousted by her new employer, Salesforce.com. The Register reports Prez Sueltz leaves Salesforce.com: “One source said Sueltz was ‘devastated’ over the parting of the ways with Salesforce.com. Sueltz joined the firm believing she would be groomed for the CEO position. Sueltz did not return our call seeking comment.”

Although I didn’t work directly for Pat in Sun Software or Service, our paths crossed frequently; several of the Town Hall meetings that she held here in Burlington turned into Geoff’n’Pat shows. During the stressful uncertainty that accompanied the big layoffs at Sun in the years after 9/11, I always felt that Pat understood the human side of things better than any of her colleagues.

When Pat first joined Sun, I was a little surprised (and a bit concerned) to see that she was was less confrontational and assertive than some of her peers (and certainly less than her predecessors – anyone remember JanPieter?!) Gradually I came to appreciate how effective she was in working behind the scenes, achieving her goals by patient persuasion, loyalty, and coalition-building. In talking with her it was clear that, despite her relatively low-key style, she cared passionately about what she was doing. I hope this latest event is only a temporary setback.

UPDATE: Looks like I was slow on the uptake – this story hit two weeks ago. I guess El Reg only just picked it up.

I’m involved in Sun’s engineering mentoring program, known (inevitably) by its acronym SEED (Sun Engineering Enrichment & Development), and today we’re having an all-day meeting for the participants, both mentors and… hmm. What word should I use? I know that some people use mentee, and I’ve even seen it in a dictionary, but it doesn’t work for me.
Anyway, we’ve got various speakers scheduled, including executives and domain specialists. There’s also going to be a session consisting of short presentations by the mentees program participants. As I blog this, Greg Papadopoulos is reprising his CEC presentation “The Future Is Not What It Used To Be”, in which he highlights the shift in software/service business models and the implications for innovation within the company.
Naturally this is a distributed meeting. Most participants are in our Menlo Park campus, and the agenda runs from 9-5 Pacific time. There are five of us in a conference room here in Burlington, Massachusetts; we’re going to have to decide whether to stay until 8pm, taking into account the winter storm that is bearing down on us….
[UPDATE: After a careful risk analysis, I drove home around 3:20pm; it took me about an hour. It started out as snow; by the time I got home it was ice, ice ice. And now I’m dialled back in to the meeting.]
[Blogged on my Ferrari running Solaris 10, using the web interface to my blog. Now I need a good Solaris blogging tool, as good as MarsEdit on my Mac. And despite Alec’s comment. I don’t regard EMACS as an alternative. Maybe it’s a platform on which to build a solution, but…]

A reference in Marion’s blog sent me off to a fascinating piece by James Governor: Why Sun Software Licensing is Like a Hermann Miller Chair. He starts with the counter-intuitive fact that some customers are reported as saying that our flat-rate pricing for JES is “confusing”. Governor makes the point that the confusion comes not the pricing model but from its unfamiliarity. He cites Malcom Gladwell, who argues in his new book, Blink, “that it’s a mistake to rely on the first impressions of customers who are inherently biased against the unfamiliar” and that “focus groups hold back, rather than encourage innovation.”

Like Governor and Gladwell, I’m skeptical about the use of focus groups in the early stages of developing radical product and business concepts; I see more use for them in refining and evolving well-defined products. Rather than focus groups, I prefer the “voice of the customer” approach: standardized, semi-scripted interviews with an opportunity for open-ended responses. In addition to supporting the usual statistical analysis, VoC encourages what I call “the plus-three-sigma customers” to speak their minds. These are the folks who are out ahead of all the other customers – and usually ahead of us too! They’re the ones who aren’t confused by the unfamiliar, and who tend to be impatient with groupthink. To return to Governor’s piece, they’re the folks who would grab that ugly Aeron chair and and see at once how to build their workspace around it. They’re our natural collaborators in exploiting innovative and contrarian technologies.

The Register just gave Scott some space to share his Xmas dream. Although it’s pretty goofy, it’s nice to see the old familiar Scott back. (A little gentle bashing once a year isn’t going to hurt.) Memo to Jonathan: the “11 words” are necessary but not sufficient. And Scott clearly has his priorities right: he wants “an NHL hockey season ticket and a new set of irons to knock a couple of strokes off my handicap” I think he’d settle for just one NHL game….

My colleague Jim Grisanzio noted Ashlee Vance’s piece in the Register about the Merrill Lynch analyst who thinks Sun should buy Red Hat or Novell. Surprisingly, Jim only cited the Merrill Lynch argument; he failed to mention Ashlee Vance’s devastating rebuttal. Key quotes (with my emphasis):

Merrill Lynch ignores how messy Sun’s purchase of a Linux vendor could be. We doubt that open source zealots would warm to the idea of Sun controlling the dominate [sic] version of Linux as quickly as the analyst firm suggests. We doubt that IBM, HP or Dell would let such an acquisition happen in the first place.
Merrill Lynch’s myopic focus on what Red Hat might mean to Sun is also totally absurd. The entire IT community would be shaken by such a buy. Sun would pay a premium for something it doesn’t really need. It can ship Linux on servers just as easily as Dell can.
Backing Linux in a major, major way would make Sun look like every other vendor, and this is not a role Sun is well suited to handle. At times, it seems that Sun exists for no other reason that to be different from the herd and offer customers a choice.

This last point is important. As I’ve mentioned before, people expect Sun to be the industry’s creative, iconoclastic contrarian. A “me too” Sun would confuse (and disappoint) them. We at Sun need to meet this expectation in our conversations with them – this is simply cluetrain 101 stuff. And this fits with Ashlee’s bottom line:

Sun has got to out-invent, not out-acquire its rivals to be “hot” again. Customers will pay more attention to a screaming fast, cheap Opteron box that can run either Solaris x86 or Red Hat than they will to Sun buying an expensive open source software unit in Raleigh, North Carolina.

alec muffett :: dropsafe :: articles : life : I have worked 1/3rd of my life for Sun Microsystems (12 out of 36 years). For me, the numbers are 19 and 54, meaning that I’ve worked here for 35% of my life. “eek”, indeed. I’m still having fun, though….

After over 19 years working at Sun, you might think that I’ve seen it all. But last week I experienced a personal “first”: my boss, Rob Gingell, left the company. I was so gobsmacked that I checked back to make sure that this was indeed the first time that this had happened. Of course many of my former bosses have left the company (or, in the case of Phil, been tragically snatched away from us on 9/11), but in every case they’d had the decency to wait until I was no longer working for them.

I’ve never really understood why we’re always so secretive about people leaving companies. (I actually held off writing this piece until Rob had assured me that his mug-shot was on file at his new company.) After all, people come and go for all sorts of reasons, and it shouldn’t be a big deal. Rob, like me, had been at Sun since 1985, and after 19 years it’s hardly surprising that he was interested in doing something new. But we never announce these things, even internally (unless the person is retiring), and I think this has two unfortunate consequences. First, people tend to interpret secrecy as meaning that you’re trying to hide something. (“Oo-er! Rob just quit! I wonder why?! What did he know that I don’t know? Should I be worried?!”) 99% of the time, the answer is, quite simply, no. (And the other 1% there isn’t anything you can do anyway.) Second, by keeping things under wraps we lose the opportunity to celebrate the person’s accomplishments and thank them for their contributions to the company. Sure, a few of us may take them out for a drink, but that’s inadequate recognition for someone who’s touched as many lives as Rob did.

Having violated the taboo, let me say a few words about Rob. I think I first ran into him in 1986 when he was giving a talk on the recent rewrite of the virtual memory system for SunOS (the BSD-based precursor to Solaris). I remember two things from that: his distinctive speaking voice (with the pitch rising steadily through each sentence), and the elegance of the design he was presenting. Over the years we met frequently, particularly after I became a DE in 1991. He was instrumental in the mammoth Sun-AT&T Unix unification effort that became SVR4 and then Solaris; he was a passionate advocate for Java and the community process that underpinned its development; he became the CTO of the software organization; and then in 2002 he was appointed to a newly-created position: Chief Engineer, reporting to the CTO, Greg Papadopoulos.

Rob talked about his new job in an interesting interview with David Berlind of ZDNet, in which he identified his charter as conceptual integrity: “My goal in life is to make sure that all the brains [at the various Sun campuses] are effectively employed and create as much as they can. If only one person creates the ideas, you only get one person’s worth of ideas. I’d much rather have 30,000 people’s worth of ideas. […] I actually hope that it’s never true that the herding cats phenomenon vanishes from Sun. Some of the chaos you’re referring to is what makes us interesting and vital, and keeps us from getting locked into a “we’re doing this because we did it last week” mentality. That level of chaos, while it’s annoying at times, is also fairly powerful because it’s the product of having all those brains usefully applied. Where it’s a negative is when you have no way of arbitrating the chaos […] which I did locally in the software group for many years. It’s a new scope expansion to consider doing it for everything all at once.”

In the same interview, Rob spoke about his vision of how Sun was evolving. “When I say we’re working on our second-generation systems, our first generation was about practicing this [developer feedback] loop with Unix. […] The Solaris applications catalog is essentially 100 percent of any Unix applications that exist. […] When we talk about the next generation, we’re just talking about another instance of this circle that’s based on Java, where the developer number is already at three million. The apps space is only beginning to appear in some areas like your Java phone. […] All of our initiatives around things labeled SunOne are really about translating that into market share for us so that we can start to see this develop into a self-sustaining ecosystem.” It was this vision of Sun’s “second-generation” of Java-centric network computing that led me to come to work for Rob a year ago.

I know I speak for many at Sun when I say, “Thanks, Rob, for your engineering leadership, your inspiration, and your friendship. Clear skies and smooth rides…”