

Sun’s Chief Executive Tweets His Resignation - asnyder
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/suns-chief-executive-tweets-his-resignation

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JacobAldridge
Am I the only one who thinks "Tweets his Resignation" is sensationalist, link
bait bs?

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.

~~~
axod
I agree @ title. Sadly it's just how the media works.

"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.

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bensummers
I prefer a version by an ex-Sun employee:

"A thing of beauty / trampled by a philistine / he blames all but self"

<http://twitter.com/pgdh/status/8626616015>

~~~
rbanffy
I have to agree. When you have the top job, it's _all_ your fault.

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.

~~~
joshu
I dunno.

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.

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wheels
Hmm, more like:

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.

~~~
bensummers
How could giving everything away for free while hoping that people buy support
contracts possibly be a bad strategy?

~~~
bad_user
That's not what killed them ...

* 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.

~~~
ableal
> They also had the resources to pull something like Amazon's EC2

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...](http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/looking_back_on_commodities)

~~~
lallysingh
They were using older grid technologies. Instead of a VM, you put in a
terribly-documented job-script thing that was sorta like a shell script but
had extra stuff you needed in there. I spent _weeks_ trying to make it work,
and got nowhere. Took me maybe 3 hours to setup in EC2.

It's what happens when management falls so much in love with the idea that
they never touch the execution.

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paulgerhardt
While this conforms to the popular 17 syllable rule, I would argue it is not
technically a haiku because it is weak in providing an evocative image
(related to nature) which in turn conveys a sublime mix of emotions.

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.

~~~
alanthonyc
I'm with you on this. The "haiku" is overplayed. Nature is needed.

And also, not to forget, the common form of response.

~~~
DannoHung
I eagerly await a web site for communicating in sonnets.

~~~
paulgerhardt
Yes, but can you write it in 14 lines of Clojure? =D

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basugasubaku
In case you cringed at "nytimes.com" and came to the comments hoping for a
direct link to the tweet, here it is:

<http://twitter.com/OpenJonathan/status/8620937722>

~~~
pavs
Why would you "cring" at nytimes.com when they linked to that tweet in the 6th
line of the article?

~~~
basugasubaku
I guess I could have left that out. Sometimes they ask for login, sometimes
not; but I cringed and came to the comments hoping for a direct link myself.

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davidmurphy
Goodbye Sun / Hello moon / it's time to go to bed

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mscantland
It is insulting to this company's employees that Schwartz still doesn't get
it. This tweet is characteristic of his failure to view the world as it really
is, and to sell something that customers will pay for.

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.

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MikeMacMan
"Longer run, with a few million businesses and a few billion consumers on the
Web, rumor has it there are some interesting opportunities to be had.”

I really don't like this guy.

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adrianwaj
Oracle now is

Software and Hardware, Complete

this Sun never saw

\----

Bye bye Jonathan

Hi ex-playboy Ellison

IBM, HP?

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joshu
This is awesome.

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jrockway
So Java is basically a dead language now, right?

