Leading Indicators
It's nice to see Scott and Jonathan talking about Solaris and developer
issues at the Sun Analyst
Summit this week.
From Cnet -- Sun: Shame on us if we can't grow
From The Street --Sun Micro: Growth the Operative Word:
"If you want a leading indicator, it ain't revenue. It's developer adoption," said Schwartz.
From Cnet -- Sun: Shame on us if we can't grow
McNealy and Sun President Jonathan
Schwartz encouraged analysts to
scrutinize several "leading indicators," such as licenses for Sun's
now-free Solaris operating system, which the company believes portend
later revenue.
"We shipped more licenses of Solaris in the past 12 months than we have in the combined history of the company," Schwartz said, estimating that the total was probably 100 or 1,000 times more than rival Unix products from IBM or Hewlett-Packard. That, in turn, attracts developers, software companies and ultimately customers, Sun argued.
"We shipped more licenses of Solaris in the past 12 months than we have in the combined history of the company," Schwartz said, estimating that the total was probably 100 or 1,000 times more than rival Unix products from IBM or Hewlett-Packard. That, in turn, attracts developers, software companies and ultimately customers, Sun argued.
From The Street --Sun Micro: Growth the Operative Word:
"If you want a leading indicator, it ain't revenue. It's developer adoption," said Schwartz.
Ah, Maybe Scott and Jonahan should do a parody of Ballmer's monkey dance. But to make sure it's classy, they should use Monty Python silly walks too, and adopt very obnoxious french accents. A carry a parrot. A dead parrot.
Eh,
Combining this with your previous blog, about how you "Just Don't Care" about the wax: there are things that Sun says and does that developers "Just Don't Care" about. Like sun.com. Yuck!
Go look at all these so-called ugly pages and see what they have in common.
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
http://www.python.org/
http://www.php.net/
http://groovy.codehaus.org/
http://www.jython.org/
http://www.cplusplus.com/
http://www.perl.org/
you'll notice that there's no flash, and they all look like thery were designed by somebody who has never heard of the color wheel, and who flunked interface design.
sun.com wants developers? Let one of the its unix kernel hackers do the front page and tell your marketing department that times new roman and arial are "Just Fine" and when they complain, tell them: we "Just Don't Care" about your little fonts and alignments.
And please for the love of God, no Flash!
Finally: you'll notice that all these people allow you to download the stuff without asking for you to create an account and disclose ANY personal information.
While I'm out dishing out advice:
-- don't make us agree to a licence. We can read the license in the source code.
-- don't hype the stuff. be humble: Instead of saying: Solaris 10 is the Best Operating System Ever!!!, just say: It's pretty good and we use it on our servers. Here's a log of what as changed ince last time, and here's what still needs fixing. (saying "Best something Ever" makes you sound like a teen on the phone.)
-- don't worry about putting out a polished professional image. not only do we "just don't care", we also "just don't bother" to be assaulted by your slickness.
if you really want to go wild, make sun.com a wiki and be done with it. The users will make the site they want.
now, you'll just make the CIOs unhappy. But who cares? That hasn't been working very well the last couple of years. You need the developers on board. Period.
You guys absolutely need to fix your comment engine. It's horrid.
Posted by Christopher Mahan on February 03, 2006 at 04:22 AM JST #
Posted by Jim Grisanzio on February 03, 2006 at 05:46 AM JST #
I hear you. but that's the point. There is a sun.com for the suits, and then there is a insert-project-name.org for the devs.
Forget the suits. Let all of sun.com be for the devs. Remember, only the devs matter.
Posted by Christopher Mahan on February 03, 2006 at 06:01 AM JST #
Posted by Jim Grisanzio on February 03, 2006 at 07:34 AM JST #
so we don't forget the suits. Ok.I'll grant you that.
But then, why, oh why would I want to be involved?
Think about this for a second: I am a software developer for a fortune 500 (<200) and do architecture design and technology recommendation and write toolkits for other developers. The company is all serious all the time (healthcare insurance, doesn't get more serious than that). Now, we run Solaris 8 and absolutely outdated software and hardware because it's just too damn expensive to upgrade all that stuff. Not so much because of the hardware costs, and not because of the licenses, but because, (and here's the kicker) the company needs very talented solaris admin and very talented everything-else admins to migrate all these custom apps whose original teams and documentation have been lost in one to many moves. There's the real expense. so we look around for these really talented people, and we find, unfortunately, that they're in the $180K -$300K, and the max the company will pay for staff programmer is $125K. So we don't get the talented people to migrate. So we don't. and because we don't migrate, then we don't buy new Sun hardware. in fact, we lose the good and talented people, because they want to be using the new stuff.
I told management about the free T2000 offer. I told them about the free downloads. Do they care? No, because it does not solve their "we can't find skilled developers at reasonable rates" problem.
Take an informal poll of how many companies are properly staffed with solaris people. You'll be absolutely shocked.
In the meantime, we have just implemented a new enterprise resource planning system for IT. It's running on IIS, with ASP Classic. Guess why?
To echo the I-do-not-throw-chairs man:
Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers.
So now that you know, let me tell you again: Sun must reinvent itself as the Best Resource For Enterprise Application Developers. And this includes systems, upgrades, third-party, databases, drivers, bridging technology (SOAP, XML-RPC, tibco et al), email, web, and all that. it also includes supportive techs like mailing lists, bug-tracking, code-browsing, irc, im, voice-over-ip and wikis (the whole knowledge management bit)
So, ok. I'm posting this in the wrong blog. But JS doesn't like comments.
As an aside, when I was on the darker side, I had an msdn subscription, and talked to those people, even met one in person at a jazz club in L.A. and used the site and the tech like the koolaid tasted great.
But then I realised something: the Evil Empire will screw me over some day. And they did. And now I am firmly entrenched in the unix philosophy, with all that entails.
I am not making the same mistake again, and I can guarantee I'm not the only one. You should hear the indian programmers here. There is no love lost for Sun among them, even though they dev with Java. They won't touch any other sun software at all. (yes they run eclipse).
Notice the "get firefox" icon in the lower right at eclipse.org? no flash either. Bugzilla linked on the left. and mediawiki in the "getting started box" (http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Main_Page).
Last time I checked, they had plenty of developers on board, with more coming each day. And the company has paid money for myeclipse (http://www.myeclipseide.com/) licenses.
Posted by Christopher Mahan on February 03, 2006 at 09:56 AM JST #
Jim, to comment on my last post.
I was pretty harsh, and I apologize for that. Also, I was fairly rambly. Not good. I'll do better.
Posted by Christopher Mahan on February 09, 2006 at 03:17 AM JST #
Posted by Jim Grisanzio on February 09, 2006 at 04:12 AM JST #
Posted by james governor on August 01, 2006 at 06:47 PM JST #