Monday July 12, 2004

I just read an article on Open Source Solaris and customers questioning Sun's effort on open sourcing Solaris. This blog entry is not about open sourcing Solaris, but I do keep articles like this in perspective. And there are many, many articles like this one. No company or individual is immune from articles like this one.

Give me a topic. Any topic. Any good columnist could find supporters of that topic and detractors of that topic (and typically do). Of course, this columnist chose the more controversial title using the word "question". The columnist could have found more quotes from those supportive of our open sourcing Solaris and used the title "Sun customers support Open Source efforts". But he didn't and that is OK. The guy is just trying to do his job by acquiring readers. A title including the words "Sun" and "Question" will pull readers. If one thing sells, its controversy. He sure got me to "click" :)

I don't take much away from articles like this, even if it were positive to Solaris. This is one columnists take on the state of affairs and that columnist found some who agree. Is what this columnist is writing about a trend? Dunno. Unless there is something more representative to analyze no one really knows. Just don't read articles like this and think a trend is happening. Its simply one data point. Take trade rag articles with a grain of salt, or better yet, many grains of salt.

Today, my first day back from a week of vacation, I have 1263 new messages. That is actually a slow week. I am usually up above 2000/work-week but of course, most of Sun was on vacation. Scary. I heard a statistic a while back that Sun does over 5 million emails/day. That's 142.8 email messages/day per employee. Sun *lives* on email.

Part of it is my fault. I am subscribed to many email lists. Sun also lives on email lists, based on topics. Since I am in sales, I tend to subscribe to many of them to get a broad swath of what is going on across the company as what I read may be of value to my customer base. I have built a strategy of email filters (no-brainer), color coding, and subject line perusal to look for topics of interest. Digests don't do it for me since I never go back and actually read them.

Part of the problem is spam. Spam filters don't catch 100%, but my life would be miserable without them.

Other morning rituals, besides email, include perusing various industry news web sites, our own web site, and sometimes competitive web sites. This gives me, again, a broad swath of what is going on in the industry.

I am now adding a RSS aggregator to my list. I expect this to replace much of my news persual, but I am not there yet. Finding a good RSS aggregator for Linux is tough. HotSheet doesn't do it for me yet. It is still a work-in-progress. Hats off to John Munsch for getting it kicked off, though. I heard there was a firefox plugin. That may be my next step (although I will have to install firefox).

I am constantly trying to tweak my morning ritual to make it more lean and mean. There are just too many interesting things going on out there. RSS looks like it will solve much of the aggregation problem for me, although I wish there were some tool out there to easily categorize by subject/topic. Add email into the same tool and my life will be much easier. If there is such a tool, please comment.