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.

Saturday March 05, 2005

We were Robbed!

Thursday night Duke went to the High School Open House and I decided to work late. When I got home the back door was wide open. I thought that was odd but I was hungry so I closed the door, fixed myself some dinner, and turned on the TV. When Duke got home about 8:30 I asked him if he had left the door open. He said no, so we assumed it was one of the kids. He went upstairs and then I heard him shout “We've been robbed!”

The upstairs had been ransacked. Every door and cupboard was open and stuff was all over the floor. There have been other robberies in our neighborhood and this guy only takes cash and jewelry. He took all our jewelry, including the kids stuff. He took some cash out of Duke's desk and he took a laptop computer. Luckily I am not much of a jewelry person so the $$ value of what was taken isn't too bad but the sentimental value is another story. I had never really thought about how jewelry tells the story of ones life.

There was the gold locket my grandmother gave me when I was born. I kept pictures of my daughters in it. Every time I looked at it I thought of the grandmother for whom I was named.

There was my Clayfield College badge. We lived in Brisbane, Australia for 5 years when I was growing up. It is the badge I work on my uniform from 6th grade on. It reminded me of a very happy time.

There was my Delta Zeta sorority pin. It reminds me of all the wonderful women I lived with in college at Iowa State.

There was Duke's paper boy of the year award. To understand its significance you have to know that we met on Match.com. He was on the three day free trial and I was hesitant to give him my real email address. One of the things that he used to convince me was that he had been a paper boy in Iowa when he was growing up.

There were beautiful earrings and a crystal broach given to me by a wonderful group of people I managed at Sun. They gave the earrings to me when I moved on to my new job. Later they gave the broach to me as a wedding present. Every time I wore them I thought of those friends.

There was the gold watch I got as a gift to commemorate working at Sun for fifteen years. It needed new batteries or I would have been wearing it.

There was the little antique silver golf club pin that I bought at an antique store in Woodstock, England on a business trip at Christmas time many years ago. I still remember how beautiful the village was and how much I enjoyed talking to the shop owner about his father who had been a silver smith and created the pin.

We are lucky that it wasn't a lot worse. What if the guy had still been here when I got home. Or he could have taken all our cameras and electronics. I can put it in perspective but still it makes me sad to lose the mementos of my life.

Thursday March 03, 2005

Random Links

I've never done this before but I thought I would try including some links to interesting blogs I've read in the past few days.

Stephen O'Grady of RedMonk has a a very interesting posting about how IBM is wooing their ISVs. I hope Sun is doing as good a job on a much smaller budget!

A blog about how people pass up free money when they don't take advantage of their company's 401k matching. It is pretty mind boggling.

I enjoyed Paul Rogers' Top 10 Best and Worst of Sun's Engineering conference I thought he did a great job of being real or perhaps it was projecting his voice. His combination of measured optimism and reserving judgement reflects my feels about Sun right now and I'm not an engineer. Although I got to speak at the conference I didn't get to attend any other parts of it.

A good laugh from Janos Cserep's Weblog.

Tom Peters always gets me thinking about how to keep my energy level and enthusiasm high. I have no simple answers but it is always worth thinking about.

That's all for now. I'm heading home.

Wednesday March 02, 2005

Happy Birthday Duke!

I bet you think I am going to talking about Sun's mascot. Sorry, but if that's what you're thinking you are wrong!

Today is my wonderful Husband's birthday. He wasn't born Duke but that's been his name for most of his adult life. I'd think it was very cool to be married to Duke even if I didn't work at Sun. But working at Sun and being married to Duke is just icing on the cake ;-)There is another cool way our names are connected. Can you guess? If not go here. Marion and Duke.

Anyway Happy Birthday Duke!!

JDS Preview to become the default

Several months ago I began talking about our plans to deploy a version of GNOME 2.0 with a JDS look and feel as a first step towards eventually deploying Solaris 10 and JDS across Sun. We call what we are deploying JDS Preview. In November we deployed JDS Preview as an option on all our SunRay servers. About 55% of our user base has voluntarily given up on CDE and started running JDS Preview.

Next week we are going to make the BIG Default change across Sun. Sun Ray users will now have to explicitly choose CDE if they want to keep running CDE. This should improve our GNOME usage significantly and make us much more prepared to move to the real JDS in the next few months. Stay tuned.