I made it door to door, from home to midtown New York, in 28 minutes. During the morning rush hour. My cause was helped by two factors -- a snowstorm which rate-limited the traffic to a fraction of its usual volume, and the fact that I made every traffic light from the Lincoln Tunnel center tube exit to my favorite parking lot 13 blocks up-and-cross town. I've never made a green light on 9th or 8th Avenues. But it's 24 hours of firsts.
Last night we hosted our pre-launch CIO dinner. We had a high quality group of attendees, from major telcos to exchanges to money-making dot-com players. When the customers in attendance are household names, and they venture out despite dire predictions from Accu-Weather, you have a nice leading indicator. Scott talked about how we've rolled the entire product line in 18 months, from the Galaxy Opteron servers to Solaris 10 to today's Niagara server announcement. And for the first time in about four years, the first customer interaction wasn't a defensive one -- instead, he told Scott "Sun is doing a lot of things well now. I congratulate you for delivering over the past few years."
The red light is on (that would be a goal, for the non-hockey fans). It's so nice to play offense again.
And here's a prediction: in about 24 months, you're going to see a rash of industry analysts, writers, pundits, and bloggers who "remeber when" they predicted the valuable new metrics of computing -- price/power, price/density, price/thread. Just as long as everyone remembers who had the first score -- just about three hours from now.