Wow...another year gone by.  It sure doesn't seem like a year since I wrote my first birthday blog, but there it is.  I'm sure this has been written millions of times before, but I never claimed to have an original thought: did you ever notice how the older you get the shorter time seems?  For my two teenagers the twelve days we just spent in Beijing must have seemed like an eternity.  To my wife and me they passed in a blur.

My staff did it again, this time while we were in Beijing, throwing me not one but two birthday parties a few days early.  Yes, even in Beijing you can get a nice chocolate cake and a decent bottle of champagne.  Thanks once again to my fantastic team for making my job so much fun!

As for time flying, let alone me, this week will go by even faster, as I try futilely to recover from my jet lag only to turn around and fly back to Tokyo next week.  Haven't abused my body this much in a while, if ever.

Happy birthday, indeed.

Well, here I am on the plane back to San Francisco after a long and very successful – I hope – trip to Beijing. We toured, we ate, we drank, and most importantly we met: with each other, with members of the team, with sales, with customers.

What will I remember most about this trip? Certainly there was great sightseeing. Our luck held beyond belief: almost every sightseeing day was dry (or at least as dry as it gets in Beijing this time of year). The rainy days corresponded almost exactly to business days. That said, it was hot, humid and smoggy even on the nicest days. Our climb of the Great Wall of China was grueling. We probably all lost 10 pounds of water weight that day. But it was worth it. Overall, most of us toured the Great Wall, the Summer Palace, Lama Temple, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven and a traditional “hutong” residence. We saw “Beijing Opera” – more like Vaudeville or Vegas than what Westerners would think of opera – and Chinese acrobatics. We had more Chinese banquets than we could count.

Oh, and we shopped. And shopped. And shopped. And still spent a lot less than we probably would have in a single day in London or Paris. We found a great tailor. We bought pearls and bracelets. A few knockoffs, but mostly local products from local artisans.

For me and my staff, though, this was first and foremost a business trip, and we did a lot of business. We met the local staff, had two all-hands meetings, worked to integrate the Java Desktop System group into my team, and did all the usual things you do at an offsite meeting: project reviews, financial reviews, strategy sessions. We learned about culture, about language, about the challenges of being remote from headquarters, about how to work better together. On Friday Sin-Yaw Wang, the new vice president of our R&D center in Beijing and I met the local press. We had lunch with a prominent member of the Chinese computer science community and a great customer visit to discuss OpenSolaris (no, sorry, I won't tell you who they were). Some members of my staff will be staying on in Beijing for a few more days to meet with additional customers. Unfortunately my family and I had to return home as my son Ben starts football practice on Monday.

And speaking of family, that's what I will remember most about this trip. Spending time with my family. Both my personal family and my extended family at work. I know this sounds corny, but bear with me. One of the things I observed to my team early in our meetings last week was how closely they work as a team, how well they get along, how little “sibling rivalry” there is – in short, how great a team they are. I noted that this was observed not just by me, but by every human resources business partner we've had over the past year or so.

What I'd always thought I'd heard was how much of a team my staff is, and I thought that was pretty good. But on Friday night it really crystallized for me. We were all at the home of Mike and Linda Hayden. Mike has just started a two year expat assignment in Beijing. Our new local human resources partner joined us, along with all of my staff, Sin-Yaw, and all of the family members who had come along with us or live in Beijing. What she said totally changed my thinking. She, too, had observed just in the couple of days she had seen us how well we worked together, how much of a team we were. But it went beyond just that, she said. We weren't just a team, we were a family. I'd never thought of it that way. I never consciously set out to make it that way. But she was right. We are a family. Solaris is our baby. We're justifiably proud of it. And just like a baby, it's growing in ways we couldn't possibly have imagined. That's the true power of family. And we learned about it by traveling six thousand miles or more so we could be together with our extended family in Beijing.

Today I'm off to Beijing, where Sun has a large and growing engineering center.  My team there now includes more than 150 people, and this will be my third trip to Beijing this year.  What's different about this trip is that I'm bringing my entire staff with me.  Why?  Because to develop and grow a site six thousand miles and sixteen time zones away from headquarters requires significant investment and dedication to success.  Giving my staff the chance to meet the engineers and managers at the site, and vice versa, is an important step in bringing Beijing virtually closer to Menlo Park.  We're very excited about the opportunities in China.  Our Beijing Engineering and Research Institute will play a large part in helping us develop those opportunities

Stay tuned.  I suspect you'll see some blogs from Beijing.