Monday March 07, 2005

Go faster! No! Go slower!

It is tough to find the balance between the need to run a business with always on availability and the need to constantly upgrading Sun's internal infrastructure to the latest and greatest software we are selling. I've been replying to employee inputs about the default change to JDS Preview that we are making later this week. A couple of emails I've received today illustrate the different points of view that exist within the Sun population.

One user lambasted us for "running a glitzed up version of some 3 year old software .... JDS Preview is nothing more than GNOME 2.0 painted to look like a more recent release." He suggested we should be rolling out the latest beta Solaris software on a monthly basis across the company.

Another user I heard from today is representative of the more than a third of the company who have chosen to stay on the tried and true, familiar CDE. She said "Why not wait until April to make people who have been using CDE and are comfortable with it try and learn something new at the end of the quarter when they are responsible for processing millions of $s in revenue? Just something else we have to account for when people are slowed down in their processing because of some new desktop environment."

This tug of war is nothing new. Anyone who has ever worked in IT is familiar with it. Actually having the discussion probably leads to a better result for Sun.