It certainly has been a while.

When you are someone like me who synthesizes and evangelizes other people's work, and doesn't create much in the way of IP myself, I didn't have a lot to say when so many others put it so well - particularly on this site! My hat is continuously off to the ThinGuy and many others of this Sun desktop world. Most of my colleagues are technical, and I am not, so I didn't feel I was doing much to help the cause.

But that was then.

Late last year I was given a copy of a genuinely nasty piece of garbage written by a competitor wherein they purported to provide the frightening facts around Sun Rays. >oh my< You know where this is going...

When I first got it I was laughing so hard I didn't make it to the end of the first page. I think there were thirteen 'inaccuracies' (at best - some were outright fabrication) just on that first page, and there were a dozen or so more pages to go. But it occurred to me that if someone didn't know how Sun Rays really worked, you might think this document was a statement of fact - something no doubt the author was hoping for. That idea made me crazy. The best part was that at the end of the document was a disclaimer saying that none of the information actually had to be true and it wasn't the author's responsibility to report factual information.

Nice.

Now with an injustice to correct I have begun to do something I can manage to assist with around our desktop technologies. I am going to try to leverage media that Sun doesn't leverage a whole lot and not at all in Canada. Yet. In talking to folks in Marketing there was decent acceptance of the ideas I had, but these things take time. Who has time?

So with that - hold on a couple days and I will be able to point you at my latest side project(s) in an effort to spread the word around our desktop products and NOT what Sun says about them - what our customers, partners and analysts say about them. Sun Ray, Secure Global Deskop and StarOffice never looked so compelling.