Monday October 31, 2005
Monday October 31, 2005 Updated on 10/31/05 for those of you whose browsers cannot read the Chinese characters below - here is a .jpg of the beautiful, traditional Chinese characters that comprise my Chinese name, ji wei xin:
When ordering new business cards a few months ago, I toyed with the idea of a chinese version. You've probably seen them before - Chinese characters on one side, standard English biz card fare on the other. I consulted with my former boss Sin-Yaw Wang about how to construct the Chinese side of the card, and he waved his hand aside brusquely and dismissed the idea as silly. His criticisms: "The standard practice is to translate the sound of your full name, only expressed in Chinese characters. You will basically hear your name in a weird way and the name has nothing to do with Chinese." And - "Those who receive your card will read English. Your phone, email, and address do not need to be translated. They also understand your title and company in English perfectly."
His advice: "Get a Chinese name. Now that will make an impression!" By making the effort to select a Chinese name - you're showing that you care about the Chinese culture. The suggestion took hold. I was born in Taipei, Taiwan and lived the first year of my life immersed in a decidedly Chinese culture. What a great idea. Sin-Yaw knows me fairly well, and I asked for his help to select my Chinese name. He said he was honored, and I do believe he meant it. With the help of Sin-Yaw, here it is. Thanks, Sin!
紀薇馨
ji wei xin
And here is Sin-Yaw's description of the name he chose for me:
"I like traditional Chinese better. They are more intense and sophisticated to me. In simplified Chinese, this name will be 纪薇馨, the form commonly accepted in PRC.
紀: (ji4) To document, to record. This is your family name. This is chosen mostly for the sound and is a relatively rare Chinese surname.
Two characters are in your given name:
薇 (wei) a flower very similar to rose. It also sounds and shapes like the word meaning subtleness or small in volume. The inspiration come from Claire that I am told is a kind of flower.
馨 (xin) the refreshing floral aroma. Combined, your name may means the floral scent of rose, or a subtle and refreshing aroma."
(2005-10-31 16:43:10.0) Permalink Comments [4]
Sunday October 23, 2005 Opportunities are what you make of them
I spent time at the Symposium ITXpo at Gartner this week. A few days before boarding a plane to Florida, someone asked if it was really going to be worth my time. Wouldn't it be better to stay in Menlo Park and get work done? Good question. I had an Ops Review coming up the next week (tomorrow, now) and it was important to have my ducks in order - plus my team has an aggressive set of goals and there is tons of work to do.
Jennifer Henderson - Analyst Relations manager extraordinaire - and I put our heads together and concluded that the trip would be worth it. We were right. But that's not the point. It could have been a poor use of my time, were it not for the determination of people on Joanne Master's AR team - Jennifer included - and Laura Ramsey - and a little bit of luck thrown-in as well. The point is that opportunities are what you make of them.
The Gartner conference is huge, almost to a fault, which makes it either exhilirating or overwhelming or both, depending on your tolerance for chaos and noise. At times, there are as many as 15 sessions running in parallel - plus the show floor to choose from. 'Tis not for the faint of heart.
The trip started with serendipity. I ran into Dinesh Bahal on the shuttle to SFO. Dinesh is a senior sales director in the Education arena. We first met 8 years ago, had just reconnected the week before and it was great to spend time figuring out where our work overlaps and how we can help each other. In fact, our shuttle conversation was so absorbing that I missed my stop and had to walk through several terminals to get back to where I needed to be. Sigh...
Face time with Laura Ramsey and Eric Boutilier was hugely valuable. Laura and Eric manned the OpenSolaris pod and spoke with lots and lots of Solaris customers, some of whom didn't yet grok how OpenSolaris helps them. If you're busy, as most are, it's easy to assume OpenSolaris is some developer program you don't need to worry about. When you peel back the onion, the possibilities jump out at you - such as the fact that there will be more Solaris sysadmins familiar with the technology and available for hire in five years time.
Joanne Masters invited me to join her and her team - Jennifer, Lara, Allison - for lunch. We sat outside in the Florida sun (and humidity!), and the conversation was an eye-opener to the world of analyst relations. Joanne also gave me some great ideas about how to connect with our sales force. Next, I connected with Dan Berg, CTO of Sun's Services organization and all-around intelligent guy, to plot what kind of seeds we should sow in the services sector because of the doors opened by OpenSolaris. [Note to Dan - Please Blog!] I attended Chris Ratcliffe's Myth Busters talk about Solaris 10, Ashesh Badani's talk on SOA, and Mark Herring's Open Source in the Enterprise talk. Then, I met Mark Driver (an open source analyst for Gartner) and talked about OpenSolaris and CDDL with him. The Gartner folks organized a gathering for us on Tue eve and I had the chance to meet and greet with analysts Laura McLellan, Daryl Plummer, Stan Zaffos, Roger Cox - and Tim Szumowski. (Although Tim didn't tell me he was a serious tennis player...)
Later that night - thanks to Laura's gracious invitation - Ashesh and I joined an impromptu dinner of sushi and karaoke with Laura, Eric, David Berlind and Dan Farber. A Frank Sinatra fan made the karaoke enjoyable and we took turns taking goofy photos wearing David's glasses. Out of respect for my dinner-mates, I didn't sing. Hope they appreciated my restraint!
I met James Dias of Selectica - another Malcolm Gladwell fan - and we shared notes about marketing and tipping points and del.icio.us and blogging - and how to make the kernel of your idea viral so the message propagates. On the flight back I sat next to Vinnie Gupta, Sun's Market Development Manager in the Edu arena, and learned quite a bit about how the Edu team gets their job done. Then, as soon as I was back on the ground at SFO, serendipity kicked in again and Stephen O'Grady and I were just a few miles from each other and were both free for an hour, so we squeezed in lunch just before Steve's keynote on simplicity at the Zend/PHP conference. I'm sure he kicked butt. All in all, a good trip. Thanks, everyone.
p.s. Kim Gerton did a phenomenal job keeping our Gartner activities organized. Many thanks!
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
(2005-10-23 14:37:48.0) Permalink Comments [1]
Monday October 17, 2005 
I'm in Orlando, Florida this week for the Gartner Symposium ITXpo along with Laura and Eric to talk OpenSolaris with the many customers and community members and potential community members and customers who flock to Disney to, as explained by the ex-Army IT executive who rode to the hotel by shuttle with me, keep their fingers on the pulse of what's happening in IT. My trip was planned by the impressive Jennifer Henderson (who had lots of help from other good folks at Sun as well) and it should be interesting. On the airport shuttle to catch my flight in San Francisco, I ran into an APAC (that's Asia Pacific) sales exec who, it turns out, I had met years ago and who I needed to connect with in order to do my job now. So we're planning on having coffee here in sunny Florida in the next few days. If you're here and want to connect, please post a comment on my blog or email me to let me know. Thanks...
And in the meantime, there is lots going on across the Atlantic at the EuroOSCON conference in Amsterdam this week. Patrick gave a good overview of the OpenSolaris plans for EuroOSCON here. Thanks, Patrick. (And since both Casper and Patrick live in Amsterdam, yep, you guessed it, they're both at EuroOSCON this week...)
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
(2005-10-17 22:37:15.0) Permalink Comments [1]
Monday October 10, 2005 The Web2.0 conference was high-energy. A mix of talented and passionate people participating in the conversation about the internet and driving change. And - Om Malik was right - I confirmed it directly, John Battelle was pleased as punch. As he should be. The format of the conference worked - a mix of 1:1 conversations, panel discussions, quick ShowMe and High-Order Bit presos and also some UI Minutes (literally, just minutes!) Lunch and dinner brought in so that attendees could eat together rather than splintering off in a million directions. A launch-pad for 13 startups (that I missed, alas - although thanks to Michele, I just secured my Wink beta login of 'claireg' and I'm already clamoring for a version of Zimbra that runs on Solaris!) Launch of Google Reader in real-time on [correction: Friday] and in just 5 minutes, Macromedia's Kevin Lynch built a flickr photo search app onstage, demonstrating with ease that flash loves html. Cool. Sure, some smart folks (including Brad Feld) have urged caution around the Web2.0 hype (hype around the internet meme, not the conference) and I can see why, but the conference itself was valuable. Having all those bright minds in one place, kibbitzing, is bound to lead to some new and interesting possibilities.
In homage to the Top10 meme I like so much, here are some memorable quotes from the sessions I attended:
"All healthy ecosystems have parasites." - Cory Doctorow (quoted by Dave Sifry of Technorati)
"A well-distributed lousy product is not enough." - Mitchell Baker of Mozilla
"Games have been described as the crack cocaine of web content." - Mark Stevens of Fenwick & West
"Blogging takes a lot less time than one-on-one interviews." - Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems
"The #1 job of a GM [or head of a movie studio] is ... to keep their job." - Mark Cuban of HDNet
"...this thing we used to call a phone." - Motorola exec (quoted by Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins)
"When I tell my son that he should pay $1 for songs on iTunes, he responds...
'Dad, that sucks. Music should be free.'" - Michael K. Powell formerly of FCC
" Ebay/Skype - best example of leading US-based technology company purchasing a leading non-US technology that had leadership in foreign markets, with intent, in part, to bring the technology into the US market" - Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley
"I did not tow your car." - Jonathan Miller of AOL
"Kids think everything is clickable - even their parents. They are always on IM, always on friendships." - Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins
Technorati Tag: Web 2.0
Technorati Tag: web2con
(2005-10-10 00:11:10.0) Permalink
Thursday October 06, 2005 Murphy on OpenSolaris and CDDL
For the record, I have never met him, never spoken with him, have not bought him flowers nor given him stock tips. All the same, he gets CDDL, and he gets the problems we were trying to solve when drafting CDDL. Jim blogged it here, and Chris Baker sent me a timely email pointer to the article as well. Thanks, guys. Paul Murphy's article is here, and for those of you who are link averse the relevant quotes about CDDL and OpenSolaris are:
"The best answer so far, at least in my opinion as a non lawyer, is Sun's community development license. Basically this is a have your cake and eat it too deal: developers keep proprietary code proprietary, participate in the free as in freedom world being built up around openSolaris, and work inside a patent umbrella held up, not just by Sun, but by mutual agreement among participating developers. In other words, Joe developer can adopt openSolaris and the CDDL ( Common Development Distribution License) without spending a nickel on legal fees and be reasonably confident that not doing something criminal (or just criminally stupid) will suffice to protect himself from legal action."
"Combine the CDDL with the fact that Solaris is the best OS around, and it's easy to see why the openSolaris community is exploding..."
p.s. to Paul: I'm a proud 'vi' user, too. But not on a Sun 60. :-)
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
(2005-10-06 18:50:55.0) Permalink
Mary Meeker - the Managing Director of Morgan Stanley's global technology research team - took the Web2.0 audience on a fast-paced, energetic walk through her view of Internet Trends this morning. Wow. I didn't think I could meet someone who talks faster than Bryan but Mary can certainly give him a run for his money. I type almost as fast as she talks but it turns out that I didn't need to - Mary's Internet Trends preso is available online - found via the Morgan Stanley TechResearch page. Rich Sharples is also in San Francisco today and blogged his thoughts on Meeker's eBay/Skype discussion here. Mary and team at Morgan Stanley are bullish about the opportunities (and the potential dislocations) in the internet and mobile internet technology areas. And ... Mary provided a healthy reminder that the mobile internet business is dramatically different outside the US. Here's an area where those of us who fly the star spangled banner are way way behind. Bottom line - if you're interested in tech and you're interested in trends - check out Mary's slides.
Technorati Tag: Web 2.0
Technorati Tag: web2con
(2005-10-06 16:08:18.0) Permalink
Our very own Jonathan Schwartz sat on a panel today with Mitchell Baker and Tim O'Reilly at John Battelle's Web2.0 Conference in San Francisco. All three were articulate, smart and provocative.
Of note: Tim pointed out that Jonathan is probably the most senior executive blogger out there, and pointed out that blogging takes time, and asked why Jonathan thinks the time is worth it. Jonathan's tongue-in-cheek reply was that blogging takes a lot less time than 1:1 interviews. His deeper answer - that there is an incredible power in community, that most people he knows in the software world make choices not based solely on economics but on philosophies and beliefs, that developers join things - they don't buy things. And that communication is a critical element in creating communities. So - he is communicating in his blog to help build a community around the Sun technology platform. And he readily stated that he's using the transparency of his blog as a competitive weapon. (And he named a few of his competitors that spend over 1/2 billion in advertising, instead.)
Of note: When asked about open source, Jonathan said that "Everything Sun does will be open source. Everything." And he advised other software companies to "Get to open source quickly. There is no downside that I can see. Get to free quickly. There is no downside that I can see." Bold statements.
Of note: Someone from the audience asked Jonathan about Solaris, all the great features in the latest version of Solaris (DTrace was named in the question), and how open source fits into that? The questioner wanted to know if the engineers are more inspired because they get to open the source? Jonathan answered by mentioning that DTrace is now being implemented in FreeBSD and that we're supporting that effort. Then he moved on to point out that there are 1000 Sun employees in the newly launched OpenSolaris community, and over 7900 community members from outside Sun. He thinks that's great. "Are Solaris developers feeling like they're responsible for everything? No." He mentioned the creation of an OpenSolaris governance process - and that Sun employees involved in Solaris are "having to learn that they're not going to be in control of everything. That's a good thing." He went on to use one of my favorite phrases - "Innovation happens elsewhere."
My thoughts: The question about Solaris would not have been on the radar screen 2 years ago. The combination of Solaris 10 innovations + disruptive free pricing of Solaris + open source via the OpenSolaris project have changed the landscape. Solaris and OpenSolaris are firmly on the radar screen for customers and developers and technologists. Especially when you consider the context - the Sun/AMD partnership, the 2004 acquisition of Andy Bechtolsheim's Kealia company, the new x64 Galaxy boxes from Bechtolsheim's team, Sun's commitment to management of your data and SarBox compliance, the throughput computing advances in the upcoming Niagara hardware, the Java ES platform, the promising announcement of a Sun/Google partnership...
As a result, the ecosystem for the Solaris platform and the OpenSolaris technology is growing, and fast. I loved the question. And I loved the level of detail and understanding in Jonathan's answer. The President of a 36,000 employee company knows about the port of the OpenSolaris DTrace software to FreeBSD - how cool is that!
Technorati Tag: Web 2.0
Technorati Tag: web2con
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
(2005-10-06 14:37:55.0) Permalink Comments [2]
