Ponder This

Wednesday December 13, 2006

Final Ponderings and Farewell

After 6 rewarding years at Sun, I have decided to accept an amazing opportunity outside Sun.

Deciding after 6 years of fighting the fight, that it could be the last and final round was not that easy. I am not one who gives up eaisly. You also get very comfortable. I came to Sun the same way, and had gotten very comfortable in the way I was doing things.

I came to Sun from a Windows world. Lived it, ate it and breathed it. At the time, Solaris did not even have GNOME support and Solaris on X86 was a bad joke. I recall sitting in my house at the time, trying to compile GNOME for Solaris as CDE was unbearable. I honestly was freaking out, wondering how I was going to be productive checking email with dtcal and dtmail? Believe it or not some people are still using dtcal and dtmail but, I will not name any names :)

It has been an unforgettable opportunity here at Sun. I spent the largest portion of these past 6 years focused on driving desktop technology and solutions. I have traveled the globe and worked with some of the best partners, customers and brightest minds in the industry. I have been given the freedom to innovate, speak openly about my ideas and have been allowed to participate in some amazing growth and changes.

I believe Sun Ray technology is the cornerstone of enabling Sun's vision of the network is the computer. Today more than ever, it offers customers the opportunity to choose what environment they display to their end users. Wether its the front end to an AS/400 or Mainframe, delivering a Solaris desktop, a Linux desktop, Windows desktops from a Terminal Server or Windows XP desktops from a VMware based VDI solution, it offers the most flexibility and freedom of choice.

As people connect more devices to the network, naturally changing the way they interact with information from the network, as security concerns grow, as distributed computing management becomes more painful, as technology changes improve the way we deliver rich content and the interaction between the network and the device. I believe, more enterprises will want a display only device such as a Sun Ray deployed in the enterprise.

There are some really passionate people in the desktop community at Sun. When your that close to people, it makes leaving that much harder. While processing my decisions, I could not help but think of the military's policy, leave no man behind. So, why leave right? I am very passionate about participating in the change I believe is occurring in the way desktop computing is done today. I am not ready to give up perusing that passion. I have been offered an amazing opportunity to chase that passion with a team that is just as passionate and full of amazingly talented people. They made it very clear, we share the same passion and wanted me as part of that team to go help make great things happen. It just made sense.

I want to thank everyone at Sun for all their support and camaraderie over the years. Sun is an amazing place. I also want to thank everyone that has called and sent e-mail messages. I have been overwhelmed with sad goodbys. I want to thank you for taking the time to show your continued support!