Seventy Hours in Beijing
Everything you read in the paper about the building frenzy in Beijing in preparation for next year's Olympics is true. The new construction alone has got to exceed the total square footage of all but the largest US cities. Driving down any major thoroughfare is simply awe inspiring, surpassed perhaps only by thinking about the growth of the Internet in China. China has an estimated 300 MILLION Internet users today, a number expected to grow to 800 MILLION by the end of the decade. After reading Jonathan's blog on brand experience, I have to add that Beijing is definitely doing a good job on theirs. The local office had made my hotel arrangements at the Great Wall Sheraton, and as a member of their frequent guest program, Sheraton usually goes out of their way to try to treat me a little special. I was, however, a little surprised when a friendly hotel staff member met me at the front door, escorted me to my room, and checked me in there. Nothing like waiting in line to check into a hotel after a long flight. Only when the staff member invited me to join their frequent guest program did I realize I had not given the local office my card number. Now I really want to come back and see what sort of treatment I get when they know I am one of their chain's frequent guests!
This morning I held a town hall for the systems engineering staff in the Beijing sales office. The advice to Sun's new Solaris marketing VP is pretty consistent, "Solaris needs to be easier to download, install, and use for us to attract new customers" and "Customer's love Solaris dtrace, ZFS, and everything else it has to offer, we just need to make it easier for customers to try out those features." It was then off to speak to one of our partners, United Electronics Co. that specializes in HPC clusters. We mainly sell Sun hardware, their CEO told me, although we do get quite a few calls from your [hardware] competitors asking us to install Solaris on their servers for a customer. That brought a real smile to my face. I then opened up an afternoon customer HPC symposium being held by United Electronics and then had a chance to catch up with Joey Guo who run's our university programs in China. He was so excited when I told him one of my next OpenSolaris marketing managers would be based in Beijing that I think we must have outlined about half a dozen possible university projects to work on. We kept talking until my host, Rita, had to drag me off to another meeting. Astute readers may remember Rita who I introduced as one of our campus ambassador interns when I met her last January at Sun's APSTC review in Singapore. Well, Rita, I am proud to say, received her master's degree in computer science last week and this week became Sun's newest full time employee in Beijing. Don't worry, I told Rita, you won't be this busy every week at Sun, for Chinese New Year things slow down a bit. Speaking of hospitality, shortly after I returned to my hotel room this evening, the bellman knocked on my door. Because of my well spent time with Joey, United Electronics had not been able to give me the Sun backpack that all attendees and speakers at their event had received so they had one delivered to the hotel.