Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

Here is a simple test you can all participate in. What do branding, gaming, and computer science have in common?

a) Many top companies are trying to do all three

b) Many top engineering schools are trying to do all three

c) It is really hard to find people who are experts at all three

d) All of the above

If you have visited sun.com recently, some of our new branding efforts are apparent with more to come. I recently reviewed a draft copy of a document titled The Sun Manifesto, developed to relate Sun's corporate strengths and beliefs to our brand. As a computer science major in college, my notions of brand were pretty much limited to the dictionary definition of "A trademark or distinctive name identifying a product or a manufacturer." Happy to say I went back later to get better educated on branding and other business management topics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

With a little help from the Sun Manifesto, I think a lot of Sun employees will start thinking about the importance of branding in their everyday jobs. The big Sun logos like the ones in our El Segundo demo room

are nice, but the logo alone doesn't do much unless people associate the brand image with your core strengths and beliefs.

In between undergrad and business school, I strayed cross-town to get my master's degree from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. It wasn't called Viterbi then but it is clear that USC has put a lot of effort into branding the Viterbi School these days. In fact, I attended an industry curriculum review last week of the Viterbi Computer Science Department. You guessed it, one of the topics was the school's branding. More on that later. The curriculum review was really interesting. First of all, besides my industry peers and the usual collection of CS professors, a half dozen undergrad and graduate students spent the day with the group to help provide a students view of the curriculum. That added a lot to the conversations. The students were a bit quite in the morning but after mixing at lunch with the industry folks, they really opened up in the afternoon sessions.

One of the hottest topics at USC (and many other schools these days) is gaming. Or should I say game development. Doesn't hurt when Electronic Arts comes in and says they need to hire 300 game developers a year for the next 3 years. We heard from new USC professor Michael Zyda, recently named director of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering GamePipe Laboratory. You have probably heard of ISI, but did you know it is an institute within the Viterbi Computer Science Department?

My final report card for USC Viterbi School of Engineering:

Gaming, A

Branding, B (work on ISI)

Keeping Alumni involved: A+