Sun’s Chief Executive Tweets His Resignation

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/suns-chief-executive-tweets-his-resignation

by asnyder • 16 years ago

81 29 16 years ago

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

basugasubaku2• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

basugasubaku2• 16 years ago

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.

shrikant• 16 years ago

"[S]eems only fitting to end on a haiku" seems a rather generous interpretation of the meaning of the cliche "seems only fitting".

paulgerhardt3• 16 years ago

The gesture may not have been entirely hollow (in Jonathan Schwartz's mind). Ellison is known to have a thing for feudal Japan: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/23/60II/main601722.sh...

joshu2• 16 years ago

This is awesome.

paulgerhardt3• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

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

DannoHung• 16 years ago

I eagerly await a web site for communicating in sonnets.

patio11• 16 years ago

If you were doing Japanese poetry it might be a senryuu rather than a haiku. In English, I think a fair case can be made that the word "haiku" means something different than 俳句 does, and that's OK.

(For one thing, your notion of a syllable as an English speaker is related to the mora Japanese counts by, but they're not the same thing, even when counting for corruptions of English words. Patrick is 2 syllables, パトリック is 5 mora. This means every haiku you've ever heard much longer than is "acceptable", for a certain very proscriptivist form of "acceptable".)

This is a topic of accidental interest to me because one of my undergrad theses was on autogenerating haiku. (If there were a Turing test for haiku, one my program wrote is better than anything I've ever written. The next hundred were crappy. The great thing about it as a CS problem is that haikus force the reader to do so much of the work that as long as you have a good dictionary of seasonal terms to work with mashing a few of them together may actually result in something pretty, even with a very minimal understanding of grammar.)

JacobAldridge• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

wheels• 16 years ago

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.

bensummers2• 16 years ago

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

bad_user• 16 years ago

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.

bensummers2• 16 years ago

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

rbanffy2• 16 years ago

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.

joshu2• 16 years ago

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.

ShabbyDoo• 16 years ago

From my perspective, the issue was with execution, not strategic values. Recall the SmugMug guys struggle to use Sun hardware. Not only could they not get someone from sales to return their call, but they had a heck of a time even getting the devices set-up in their datacenter.

http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/05/16/sun-honeymoon-update...

How many things must have gone wrong so that a config UI requiring a non-obvious, redundant magic string could have gotten out the door?

Edit: The "jumped the shark" moment was when, at JavaOne, Sun claimed it would build the world's largest app store by installing nagware along with the JVM.

davidmurphy• 16 years ago

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

jrockway• 16 years ago

So Java is basically a dead language now, right?

adrianwaj2• 16 years ago

Oracle now is

Software and Hardware, Complete

this Sun never saw

----

Bye bye Jonathan

Hi ex-playboy Ellison

IBM, HP?

MikeMacMan• 16 years ago

"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.

mscantland• 16 years ago

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.

Sun’s Chief Executive Tweets His Resignation

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