On Monday, March 19th, I had the privilege of attending Sun Mashup Event featuring a debate between Web blogger Mike Arrington and Sun Microsystems’ Tim Bray, most famously known for being the co-inventor of XML (Extensible Markup Language). The debate centered around the term “Web 2.0†and other related topics surrounding the current web where it has transformed the way we communicate, do business, and breaking the walls of information. Traveling from Davis to Menlo Park is quite a long drive; it took us, my team members and me, about an hour and forty minutes to get to Sun’s HQ.
Arriving there just in time to catch the last few questions the audience asked Sun’s CEO Mr. Jonathan Schwartz, I was excited to experience what the rest of the event had in store. Mr. Schwartz’s brief talk touched briefly about Sun’s approach now after having to deal with their rough times after the post dot com bubble. He admittedly mentioned Sun’s approach now is to develop that so called ‘listening gene,’ used in customer meetings to spread their technologies and hopefully win their business through their solid products. While the debate topics, which were the main event, between Mr. Bray and Mr. Arrington were interesting and mind stimulating, I was more interested throughout the event in taking what they talked about and analyze it from a, “What’s in it for us?†Sun prospective. Mr. Schwartz’s short appearance definitely got my mind thinking.
Here’s a bit of information about me and my interest in Sun even as a business major: Ever since Josh joined forces with Calvin and me in the company, Josh has fed me bits and pieces of his vast tech knowledge over time. One of these topics was about how highly he respected Sun’s technologies and their company. At the time, I was curious about SUNW and so I did some research. Despite the financial fundamentals of the company not looking too great since the dot com bust (from $64.31 to $6.18), Josh (stubbornly) encouraged me to look beyond that. With confidence, he explained Sun’s problem was never about their technology. They have great technology. They just did a terrible job running the business aspect of the company. Lately, they have been cleaning up their irresponsible spending. Six months removed from Josh telling me about Sun, they reported their first quarter (in January 2007) in the black (profit) after eight consecutive quarters in the red.
Back to yesterday’s event – from an attendee’s standpoint, I was impressed at first glance at Mr. Schwartz and Sun’s acceptance of the new web concepts and being the supporter of entrepreneurs and small businesses. They have followed through with their approach in forming bridges not walls: Opening up Solaris to the public, developing a Sun Startup Essentials program for startups, and had every single Sun employee at the event that I talked to, ask genuinely, “How may we help you? Is there anything we answer for you? If you have any questions, here’s our website and we are very responsive to questions asked online. It is our job to advise, answer, and share our knowledge of Sun’s products to help your business.†Sun is trying to reach out to all startups as a way to engage the next generation of infrastructure consuming companies by taking the try, learn, and if you like it, buy it and support us approach.
It’s unfortunate that I’m no Computer Science guy; I can only imagine how much more enthusiastic I would have been to be able to not only communicate on the business level, but on the technical level at the event as well. I believe their approach in opening Solaris up, in supporting up the entrepreneurs and small businesses, and offering many tools for developers to learn their technologies will pay off big time in the future – look no further than what Linux/MySQL has done to the web – with their movement. All this is a testament to Mr. Schwartz’s lead. He is the engine that is leading the way for Sun’s reemergence recently.
I’m excited to learn more about Suns’ initiatives from a minority shareholder’s standpoint and their technology from a small company standpoint. Thinking back, with all that’s going on, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Schwartz, in the role of President for four years and counting and CEO for less than two years and counting, used the business driven, multi-faceted approach made most popular by GE’s Jack Welch – Six Sigma - to lead this change at Sun. Whatever Mr. Schwartz and his team is doing, it seems to be working. They get it.
