Blogging Roller

Ellison says he learned that Sun's pony-tailed chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, ignored problems as they escalated, made poor strategic decisions and spent too much time working on his blog, which Sun translated into 11 languages.

"The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn't succeed," said Ellison. "Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales."

Ouch! I guess Ellison isn't going to be signing up for an account on blogs.sun.com anytime soon. At least he acknowledges the "really great blogs."

Linda Skrocki: I find it interesting that although trust is a two way street, the focus in the blogoshpere is often on companies going out on a limb by trusting employees to blog on a corporate sponsored site, but the fact is, employees also go out on a limb for companies when they contribute content to the company blog site (whether it's personal or not).

Solaris back in the race: Last week, I wrote about us discarding Solaris for a new project. Most large companies will not care and not listen to their customers. Many of us have dealt with Verizon, Time Warner, Creative Labs, etc and know what I mean. After all, when you have so many customers, it is cheaper to lose a bunch of them and provide overall bad service than it is to fix real problems. After my short experience with Sun, I assumed it was the same:I WAS WRONG. They do listen!

That's my experience too. Folks at Sun are very tuned into the blogs, forums and other sites where our products might be discussed. We subscribe to RSS/Atom keyword search feeds so we can find out who is talking about our products, we join the conversations and we try our best to make things right when they go wrong. Critical blog posts about us almost always set off a flurry of activities on our internal bloggers mailing list. It's nice to see when those "inbound messaging" efforts pay off.

Anil Dash: The only tools that succeed in an enterprise situation are those which are so compelling that people choose to use them in their free time.

[...]

When I talk to companies about blogging, I ask them how their Knowledge Management or Enterprise Content Management deployments have succeeded. And they almost invariably mumble a bit about "it's sort of underperforming...". This is the dark outcome of people trying to draw a line between who we are at work and who we are at home. You end up with shoddy, compromised products like KM or groupware. And the folks in IT aren't unfeeling, tyrannical monsters; When I tell them "well, we'll give you LDAP integration, but it'll also have a UI that's easy enough that people choose to use these tools in their free time as a hobby", their eyes light up. They want to delight people, too.

A great post by Anil Dash, VP and chief evangelist at blog software vendor SixApart. There are counter examples. I mean, who really spends a delightful and inspiring Friday evening with SAP? But generally I agree. Those of us who make enterprise software have a lot to learn from the consumer market.

And it reminds me of my old Dave on software post.

• ZDNet: GPL 3 isn't the 'last call'
  "here are some key changes in the latest GPL draft and how they're designed to target the Microsoft-Novell partnership"
• Allison Randal: GPLv3, Third Draft
  "I'm beginning to lose confidence in the FSF as the primary defender of free software principles"
• Simon Phipps, SunMink: GPLv3 Third Draft
  "All very interesting, I know there will be a lot of discussion about this inside Sun over the next few weeks."

• Slashdot | Linux Preinstalled Dell Available Soon
  in the comments: "So I'm wondering if this is an actual effort to offer Linux boxes or another PR stunt?"
• Ian Murdock: Making Solaris more like Linux
  "There is no reason we can't make Solaris look and feel more like Linux"

• InfoWorld: Dell division will design Web 2.0 datacenters
  "Dell hopes to sell the service to only the largest Web-based companies, the top dozen or two dozen hyper-scale datacenters of the business world"
• Sun HPC Watercooler: Rackable Clones Black Box
  "a 40-foot by 8-foot mobile data center with the capacity to hold up to 1,200 of company's rack-mount 1U (1.75-inch) servers"

• fnokd! JBoss.ORG: Blogging & RSS
  "I think personal blogging, even on corporate topics, tends to be more real and honest."
• fnokd! JBoss.ORG: Plans
  Plans include Blogging, RSS and aggregation
• BCOM 522: Corporate Blogs: Sun Corporate Blogs Case Study
  "blogs also give Sun engineers an outlet for showcasing and getting credit for the work they're doing"
• Discovering Identity: Treo Blogging Attempts
  Mark tried u*Blog, HBlogger, BlogPlanet, and mo:Blog -- "This little exercise has fallen way short of my expectations"

• Breathing Life into a Dead Coyote (Part 1)
  Geerjan works to bring the Coyote project back to life for Netbeans 6.0
• Southeast VC: Calling All Entrepreneurs
  "I still keep hearing from entrepreneurs that VCs are hard to reach"
• Ben Rockwood: Web 2.0 Mashup: Define it and win a prize
  "people like Tim Bray lay the foundations for greatness and people like Michael reap rewards not due to them"

Last week was deadline week for JavaOne and ApacheCon EU presentations, so I was busy. Fortunately for me, my other deadlines were postponed, I did some begging for time and I actually had time to take a short vacation; a family reunion at Stone Mountain park, Georgia. Here's some more information about my ApacheCon talk and an outline of the slides. 

Mike Swaine in Dr. Dobb's Journal: But employee blogs are turning out to be a good place to go to track what's really going on. When Sun partnered with the University of Kent on the NetBeans IDE/BlueJ Edition, Ian Utting of U Kent vlogged in Sun's blog space about this beginner's Java tool. Incensed by rumors that Java doesn't work on Windows Vista, Sun's Chet Haase blogged to the contrary. And, responding to a high-news-value development, CEO Jonathan Schwartz links to YouTube video of Jonathan and Sun's Chief Technologist Greg Papadopoulos on Oracle's decision to fork Linux. (Hey, that's Jonathan's choice of words, not mine.)

And maintaining a place for ex-employees to blog is either brilliant or loony. My guess is, brilliant.