JohnnyL's Blog

Finding a great code-name for a product at Sun is akin to naming your first child. Lots of opinions. Lots of controversy. EVERYONE has an opinion. Sometimes the names are arbitrary, sometimes they have subliminal significance to what the product is or represents. In the late '80s Sun's first SPARC microprocessor-based desktop was named "Campus" which represented it's first target market: education.

Our latest code name is "Project Red October" which applies to Wednesday morning's announcement of our software strategy. Why Red October? Maybe because one of my kids is into anything military and we've seen the movie "Hunt For Red October" 312 times... But there was a scene in the book (and movie) that not only represents what we're doing in software, but also how Sun has been able to continually pioneer its own trail.

If you recall the scene, the U.S. commander is about to fire on the Russian Red October submarine, but is persuaded by Alec Baldwin's character that the Russian vessel is about to do a "Crazy Ivan" -- a one-out-of-the-ordinary evasive maneuver. When expected to go right, it goes left. Unexpected. Completely disruptive. Very Sun!

It's our history. Just when the industry thinks they've figured us out, Sun pulls a Crazy Ivan. When the entire industry adopted Windows NT, Sun doubled down its investment in Solaris and everyone said we were crazy.

When Sun applied its volume, standards-based systems design approach to commercial-grade servers, again, we were crazy.

When Sun moved its entire software stack to a simple subscription pricing model...crazy.

Open sourcing Solaris. Crazy? In all cases, the Crazy Ivan moves had a positive, often wildly positive, result for Sun.

So what is the latest Crazy Ivan move for Sun? You're hours away from finding out!

Comments:

Back in the late 80s or early 90s, I was working on PC-NFS and related products, and we had to put out a regular product update during a time of great turmoil and constraint. We knew that this was going to be "the release from Hell", and so I chose the code-name Damien. All went well for a few days, and then a small number of people approached me and said that they were "uncomfortable" working on a project with a name that had "diabolical associations". Most of us thought that this was... well, silly - but to preserve team harmony we changed the name to capybara. We thought that the largest rodent in the world should be a safe choice....

Posted by Geoff Arnold on November 29, 2005 at 05:56 PM PST #

Johnny: You did it. Very nice. Thanks. Pls keep making those Crazy Ivan moves... :-) --ClaireG

Posted by Claire Giordano on November 29, 2005 at 08:30 PM PST #

You're not crazy, not one jot - this seems to make total sense to me, levelling the playing field and removing the hardware/software dependency means SUN can focus on being the best hardware vendor in the marketplace - ensuring that developers can add their value at 0 cost to entry is something Microsoft must be wishing they had the option to do. I am sure that many solution architects such as myself who have worked with a variety of tools are going to be confident that the next generation of architects will be fluent in Java, Solaris and Linux - I wonder what the business case is now for using other proprietary tools that are not free. What really counts though is that perhaps now developers will begin to write software for people and not other developers, we've had so many upgrades, languages, new standards etc. to embrace since I got started in this business - what happened to just getting on with the job of delivering what the customer wants instead of jumping to the next version because it adds this or that new feature - since Java and .NET we now have excellent toolsets to write exceedingly productive applications - coupled with the increase in performance, reduced cost of disk and the spread and uptake of broadband networking you'd wonder why more businesses aren't using more software and improving their productivity. Thanks SUN - each time I hear one of your announcements I smile a little more, laugh a little longer and sleep better at night knowing it won't be software that is the issue tomorrow.

Posted by Ed Daniel on November 30, 2005 at 05:55 PM PST #