Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

I've been confused for many people and many things in my 43 years. I'm frequently approached by people speaking Spanish, believing that I can help them while we're enqueued or otherwise confounded by the public sector. Sadly, the only thing I know how to say is Yo tengo uno lapis amarillo (I have a yellow pencil), which doesn't help when you're at the division of motor vehicles. I've been mistaken for Art Licht, one of our ace storage evangelists and architects, and each time I've resisted accepting additional sales goals on his behalf.

An incident in the hotel pool from last week has me swearing off the Mike & Ikes for good. As I was playing football with my son, a woman on the side of the pool kept looking over at me, and finally asked me "Are you on the Sopranos?" I know that water refracts light, and fish always seem bigger when they're still in the water, but being confused for Steve Schirrapa, AKA Bobby Bacala, was not flattering. It's an early warning sign that I'm almost big enough to have a measurable gravitational field.

Pluto may no longer be a planet, but I'm on my way to taking over that 9th spot.

Just returned from a week in {hot, humid, steamy, rainy} Orlando, Florida, enjoying Disney, Universal, surfing in Cocoa Beach (kids, not me), and some quiet time. I'm almost always impressed with the engineering at Disney theme parks, whether it's the forced perspective that makes Cinderella's castle appear much larger than it is, the transitions between themed lands, or the seemingly irrelevant details (like Hidden Mickeys) that make the Disney experience fully immersive.

The Disney Imagineers have now published two books, one a field guide to Walt Disney World and the other a series of engineering "team exercises". My favorite line from the latter is that if you don't get the results you expected, your story may have gotten confused. Telling the story, complete with minor details and backgrounds, is what makes a theme park experience fun.

It's no different with technology. One of the reasons that Sun has been gaining market share is that we have a powerful story to tell. At the bottom of the dot-com bust, it felt for a while like we had run off the end of the runway with our "dot in dot com" story. Today, we have a pretty simple story: we build infrastructure products (software, services, storage and computer systems) that are power, space, price, developer and operator friendly. The story resonates with both coders and CIOs -- two of our biggest audiences for the Sun narrative. How those products implement identity, or how you best develop software for a chip multi-threading CPU, or how we support minimized security configurations are the details in the story.

I am not your usual corporate cadence person. I only tolerate face to face meetings if there's something that can be accomplished by thinking out loud, drawing on the white board, or splitting off into small teams to divide and conquer a bigger problem. I believe in regular, fact-filled communications. I'm not a fan of long staff meetings. Now that I have a global staff that reaches Seoul, Prague, St. Petersberg (Russia, not Florida), Menlo Park, New Jersey, Boston and soon, Dallas, I'm experimenting with time-space synchronization.

Last night was the first (and potentially last) late-night staff call. Trying to limit the number of badly timed calls per month, we rotate our conference call times, with last night's agenda starting at midnight EDT, early morning in eastern Europe and a pleasant mid-afternoon in Korea. This may work.

More important than communication among my staff is our communication to anyone with an interest, inside or outside of Sun. That's the whole point of transparency; you don't really care about the line items on a budget unless it means there's something new you can use as an employee, customer, developer, or partner of Sun's. In addition to my blog, Dan Berg, CTO for Global Sales and Services and the Vice President of Europe, Middle East and Africa Systems Engineering is in the mix, and today, SeChang Oh, Director of Asia-Pacific Systems Engineering added his voice. They represent the electronic face of Global Systems Engineering, and cross time zones and cultures much better than our own Late Night show posing as a staff meeting.

One of the major problems I need to tackle in our field organization is to foster communites of experts, and create some open space in which new expertise can blossom and be discovered. In a sidebar with our Chief Learning Officer, Karie Willyerd, it hit me that we really need are vanity wikipedia pages for engineers in systems engineering, our product-focused practices, and our customer support functions.

About three weeks ago, we did a stealth launch of our CEpedia (if you're inside of Sun's network firewall, try it as a universal URL from any SWAN domain). CEpedia is the Customer Engineering Wikipedia. It's based on the WikiMedia software distribution; it was built in all of about 3 days with some hard work from Liz Wilson, Mike Briggs and Scott Radeztsky (thanks, folks). Simple efforts with massive leverage -- one of the ways I think most grassroots efforts start.

It grew to about 50 users through the usual "don't tell anyone" electronic word of mouth that initiates a tipping point. I pushed it along a bit further this morning by talking about it in front of our Americas sales organization. That's all of the advertising I'll give it; the rest should be floated by the community of engineers. My first evidence of traction came tonight when I found a blog referrer pointing back to cepedia. That was my intent -- to create a map of the myriad respositories, resources, and content within and outside of Sun, and to make it easy to find experts.

Now it's up to the experts to populate the wiki. I'm confident that our customer-facing engineers will do just that, with the right blend of fun, facts and fresh ideas to make cepedia the internal, entertaining authority on who knows what.

Just got back from Orlando where I had a blast at the Americas Sales Kickoff. The energy level was high, a combination of a clear strategy and a great set of products to sell. I did my first trial run of a technical strategy for the global systems engineering community -- most of which I'm going to share here.

I had the advantage of being Scott's warmup act. Guaranteed audience, even if it was in the "hangover slot" first thing in the morning. I titled my talk We're the "Oh" in Web 2.0, mostly a play on Jonathan's post about the dot in 2.0. My goal was to generate some interest in the "oh" as in "oh, there is a bucket of technologies in which we can drive customer conversations". As some folks have argued, we're not sure it's Web 2.0 if we don't know when the cutover from Web 1.0 happened, and we may very well be into Web 3.0. I'm much more interested in the version suffix as an indicator of change and opportunity, rather than the major version.