
Jonathan Schwartz Blog - bgray
http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/
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100k
"What I Couldn't Say..." about driving a Fortune 500 company into the ground.

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hga
Come on, he wasn't CEO until April of 2006; all you can fairly say is that he
failed to save Sun, which is a very different thing.

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i386
"The decision to go with Microsoft was based on overall value - it was also
predicated upon their endorsement of and agreement to help promote MySQL. Stay
tuned for more details on what we'll be doing together."

From:
[http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/winds_of_change_are_blow...](http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/winds_of_change_are_blowing)

This has always been my favourite example of Shwartz' inability to grasp
reality. Perhaps I am interpreting this incorrectly but Microsoft "help[ing]
promote MySQL?" This deal didn't sound sane in January 2008 and it looks even
more ludicrous to me in 2010.

By early 2008 the company had lost most of its value despite having a strong
brand and a talented pool of engineers. What was going on at Sun? Deals to
ship dinky browser bars with Java, JavaFX (which stood no chance in a market
dominated by Adobe with Microsoft nipping at their ankles), no roadmap for
JAVA 7, inability to see the potential benefits of ZFS on Linux - really, we
could be here all evening.

You don't "save" a company - You run a company and you should be "saving" it
every day with every decision you make.

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frodo
Is it the real jonathan?

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bgray
I was wondering the same thing until I saw it linked from his account on
Twitter.

<http://twitter.com/OpenJonathan/status/8972790094>

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sabat
I have had just about enough of My Little Pony.

See this opinion piece from the SJ Mercury News (from yesterday) for a well-
formed opinion: <http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14385237>

But in summation:

\- Schwartz will depart with $12.8 million in severance

\- The company will pay his health insurance premiums for two years

\- Average Sun employees got a maximum of three months of pay

\- Average Sun employees got a maximum of two months of health insurance, in
some cases less.

In January, Jonathan wrote to Sun employees: "For those that ultimately won't
become a part of Oracle, this will be the first step in a new adventure." Then
a few days ago he wrote a cute little haiku to announce his termination from
OraSun.

The laid off employees' haiku? Mike Cassidy, who wrote this editorial for the
Mercury News, says it would go something like this:

State unemployment /

over 12 percent today /

Losing health insurance soon.

