Kate's Blog

CEC closing session

Ok, so this blog entry may contain some "forward looking statements"... or not. Like most of the CEC participants, I was looking forward to Jonathan Schwarz's closing session, and was not disappointed. Since the conference team have been running a big interactive web 2.0 experiment during CEC, the audience could ask questions live during the session via SMS text message, email or instant messaging (we also were permitted "old school" questions from several microphones). Predictably, this was a lot of fun - see Matthias's blog for details. Presenters could browse through comments as they came in, and they were displayed on a large screen for the audience.

One of the questions someone sent through the web was "Will Jonathan cut off his ponytail when Sun's stock price reaches $10?". Jonathan hesitated, then said "hmmm... maybe when it reaches $15?". I immediately reached for my phone, and sent "No! Keep the ponytail!!". Everyone laughed, including Jonathan, and I had my moment of anonymous glory(?) when Jonathan said "That's my wife!".

Now, I'm happily married (not to Jonathan, I hasten to add). It seems perverse to punish Jonathan (and his wife!) for helping to drive something we'd all like to see. My husband had a ponytail until about 6 months after the dot com crash - and he cut it because when jobs become difficult to find, many people suggested that it would be easier to find work if he looked a bit more conservative. I hope we can build web 2.0 on more sensible fundamentals - and I think this is where Sun's transparency about our goals and strategies will help prevent wild speculation. I'm very glad to be at Sun - for obvious reasons, especially now - but I don't want to see another dot com bubble. I was a Java Architect at Sun then, and we knew that we were building something new and unique, as we created many of the big ecommerce websites. But that hangover isn't something you forget in a hurry.

Technorati tags: cec2006

Posted at 04:13PM 05 Oct, 2006 by Kate Morris in Sun  |  Comments[0]