McLaughlin acknowledges that Sun has shown a commitment to x86, which has been felt as strong growth within the company. "With Solaris becoming open-source software I could see Sun growing its x86 server sales."
The point is Sun have really opened up their eyes over the past year
and started listening to the customer, their blogs at blogs.sun.com
are but the surface of a total shift in the companies behaviour. Sun
is now an open company, a reputation that draws a deep contrast to
the public perception of SCO which is a book unto itself. Does
OpenServer have anything like DTrace, Zones or SIP in kernel? Why are
these things in Solaris 10? I'll give you a clue, Sun have spent a
lot of time working with their customers to find what would really
help them. Telco's wanted SIP in the kernel and they got it, Data
Centers wanted a way to trace processes and applications to find
bottlenecks and show stoppers and they got DTrace.
Corporate blogs such as BTI's are far from the only marketing
application of the medium. Another is to encourage a wide range of
employees to start blogs. Sun Microsystems has taken that road, and
so far close to a thousand employees have accepted the company's
invitation. One group of these
blogs is tied directly to existing Sun
products, such as Solaris or Java. They tell readers the most
important things that have happened in the world (in the opinion of
the author, of course) since his last posting about a given product
or product application. Other examples include the blogs on Solaris
security, storage management issues and "predictive
self-healing" (a Sun network maintenance feature). There is even
a blog devoted entirely to Solaris blogs. "People who read my
blog are my target demographic," quips marketing manager Mary
Smaragdis, whose blog on the Java developer community gets several
thousand unique visitors a week. (It carries the head "Explicitly
and without apology a marketing vehicle.") "I want people
to know about our products and buy them," she says. Smaragdis
thinks these product-oriented blogs are especially useful in
addressing niche markets that corporate marketing could not justify
devoting a lot of time to. "Blogs let everyone become an
evangelist," she says.
A
second category of employee blogging is not about current products
but, among other things, the R&D paths under way at Sun -- speech
recognition, computing for the disabled, grid computing, the
development of translation portals (the last being a knowledge
management system that can support many languages). While not focused
directly on Sun products or even on specific R&D programs, the
company gets mentioned a lot in the blogs. From a marketing
perspective, these blogs can be thought of as organizing client
constituencies in advance of possible market introductions. They
leave a reader -- presumably someone already interested in that
market -- thinking that if and when Sun does announce a new product,
it will be cutting edge.
Many of the rest of the employee blogs are on subjects of general interest -- albeit to a technical audience -- such as home automation, science fiction or the progress of UBL (Universal Business Language, an XML implementation optimized for business documents and transactions). These subjects might not translate directly, now or in the future, into Sun products, but they leave no doubt that Sun employs a lot of fearsomely bright people. They work to raise confidence in the enterprise as a whole and refocus it from one more faceless corporate profit maximizer to a living community of real folks. According to Smaragdis, multiplying the relationships people have with Sun employees also increases points of entry for people with questions about Sun products and services.
Finally, a lot of the blogs at Sun are in other languages and, as such, advance all these functions in regions of the world where corporate marketing might not have much of a presence.
This blog copyright 2009 by jimgris
