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日本翻訳に松倉綾子さんに感謝しなさい。

オフィスへ辿り着くのは、エキサイティングな一日の始まりでした。 私は、9:30から始まるミーティングのために、新宿の京王プラザホテルを8時に出発しました。 まず最初に、地下鉄の都庁前駅を見付けました。 そこから、青山一丁目まで 210円支払いました。約20分かかりました。 私は、乗り継ぎの半蔵門線を探し回りました。 いくつか階段を昇りましたが、自動改札機が私を妨げました。私の切符は、青山一丁目までの物でそれ以上先へは行けなかったのです。 先に進む為には、私は更に多く払わなければなりません。角にいくつかの自動券売機がありました。 更に80円支払った後、私は乗り継ぎの電車に乗るためにプラットフォームで待っていました。電車は、渋谷で私が待っていたホームとは違う場所に到着しました。 東急田園都市線で用賀まで行きました。用賀は急行の止まらない小さな駅です。 駅を出ると、SBSタワーの地下入り口が右側にありました。（まだ開いていませんでしたが。） 私は 8:50 に、21F に行くエレベーターを見つけました。 オフィスまでの旅は、ホテルから駅までの 20メーターを除いてすべて、雨風を避けることが出来るものでした。 とてもクールです！

私の社員証はドアを開けることが出来ませんでしたが、幸いにもある方が到着し、私をオフィス内へ入れてくれました。

ここのサンオフィスの入り口では、まだ古いスタイルのバッジ式を使用しています。私がトイレに行くのに誰の邪魔もせずに済むよう、テンポラリーカードが即座に用意されました。

オフィスからの景色は反射鏡のようです。 摩天楼都市の全景だけでなく、富士山もはっきり見えます。

社員は皆、同じサイズの、低いしきり付きの小さなブースにいます。 会議室は窓がなく、閉所恐怖症を思い起こします。 休憩室には、素晴らしいコーヒーの自動販売機（ホットコーヒーは無料）があります。 そこには、本物のスターバックスが飲めるコーヒーメーカーもあります。 すべてのブースには、ヘルメットと吊り縄式のバッグがあります。 30F 以上のビルが地震で崩れた際、頭を保護するのに重要となるのでしょう。

9:30 に始まったミーティングは、6:30までノンストップでした。 私は、サン東京オフィスと日本のビジネスを垣間見ました。 大曽根　明さん、ジム　グリサンズィオさん、末次　朝彦さんは、ここの上位職の方にあたります。かわいらしい松倉　綾子さんは、すべてのアレンジと地下鉄の情報等をくれました。

末次さんは、日本のセールスのトップの方です。 彼と大曽根さんは、日本サンの成功を収める上で密接なパートナーの関係です。 ジムさん（熱心なブロガー）は、日本に住んで３年が経ちます。彼は、サンのコミュニティーを世界、特にAPAC に広げ、築き上げる助けとなる人です。

更に私は、原口　章司さん、奥津　正義さん、仁村　一利さん、岩渕　文彦さん、塩田　智則さん達ともお話をしました。 彼等は、日本における素晴らしい洞察、日本のサン及び日本サンのエンジニアの役割を教えてくれました。 私達は、陽気な会話をしました。 そして私は、日本に病みつきになったことに気が付きました！

英語の個人的な印象のためにここに行きなさい。

Getting to the office was an exciting start of the day. I left the hotel, Keio Plaza (京王) in Shinjuku (新宿), at 8am for the 9:30am meeting start. First, I found the Tocho-Mae (都庁前) subway station. From there, I paid ¥210 for the Aoyama-Ichomei (青山一丁目) destination. That took about 20 minutes. I searched for the the Hanzomen line (藏前門線) transfer and found it several flights upstair. Several kiosks around the corner accepted ¥80. Soon, I was on the platform for the right train. At Shinbuya (涉谷) station I boarded Tokyu-Detentoshi (東急田園都市線) line to Yoga (用賀), a small station that express trains do not stop. SBS building's basement is right outside the Yogo station. I found the elevator and reached 21st floor at 8:50am. Except for the 20 meters or so from the hotel to the station, the entire trip was heated and shielded from the elements. Very cool.

My badge did not open the door. Fortunately, someone arrived to let me in. Sun's office here still uses the old-style badge for entrance. I was promptly issued a temporary card so that I can go to the bathroom without bothering anyone.

The view from the office is specular. Not only there is a panaroma view of the city sky-scrapers, there is also Fuji Mountain in clear view. Everyone is in a same-sized smallish cubicle with short partition. The conference rooms are windowless and closet-phobia indusive. The breakroom displays an impressive coffee vending machine (free hot coffee). There is also a collection can for real Starbucks brew. Every cubicles has a hard-hat in a sling bag. Guess it is important to protect your head when a 30+ story building collapses in a earthquake.

9:30 begans the non-stop meetings until 6:30pm. I got my glimpse of Sun's Tokyo office and Japan business. Akira Ohsone, Jim Grizansio, and Tomohiki Suetsugu are among the senior people here. Lovely Ayako Matsukura arranged everything and gave me the subway station.

Seutsugu-san is the head of Japan sales. He and Akira are close partners on Sun's success in Japan. Jim, an avid blogger, has lived in Japan for about 3 years now. He is instrumental in reaching out and building up Sun's communities, globally and particularly in APAC. In addition, I also talked to Shoji Haraguchi, Masayoshi Okutsu, Kazutoshi Nimura, Fumihiko Iwabuchi, and Tomonori Shioda. They gave me wonderful insights on Japan, Sun in Japan, and Sun's engineering roles in Japan. We had lively conversations and I found Japan addictive.

Click here for a more personal impression.

I was working on another blog when the announcement came. OMG, Sun is buying MySQL (I pronounce it as "my see-qual.") What came to my mind was actually a conversation with Simon Phipps a few months ago, when he talked about the business of OpenSource.

When mentioning the OpenSource community, people think of Sandra Bullock in the movie "The Net." She played the socially challenged nerd, Angela Bennett, that never leave the cluttered and dark room full of computers. Her only connections to the world are the computer network and a phone. That impression is really very far from the majority of the community members.

Most of them work for a normal IT company just like you and me. Their company pays them to OpenSource projects. It also provide computer equipment, travel money, and sponsorship to the events or marketing activities. The OpenSource community will not exist without the resources and support of corporations.

This seems odd since the iconic founder of OpenSource, Richard Stallman, has always insisted on Free Software. Although he interepreted free as in freedom, not zero in price. It is still hard for people to link OpenSource software with company revenue directly. It is not intuitive.

OpenSource software means big business and serious money. They are simply different business model than the traditional licensing fees for right to use. I believe the trend is irreversible and will eventually encompass the entire industry. The leading edge of this business model revolution are those so-called Web2.0 companies. Impressive asa they are, they are the leading edge and not the entire wave. The whole thing is many magnitudes of order larger.

This is a long essay to convey my excitement on Sun's MySQL acquistion. MySQL is the engine of this Web2.0 industry and, with Sun's resources and strategy, to become the same of the whole software industry. That will be big business and serious money for Sun.

I gave a talk to a group of relatively senior engineer on their career paths. Some of them found it interesting and encouraged me to blog about it. I was easy to convince.

Labor market essentially exchanges personal productivity with compensation. You contribute to the company's objectives; the company pays you back. Your pay is roughly commensurate with your relevant skill level. For salary workers, this market is inefficient: companies usually adjust your compensation once a year and you do not look for new jobs on a whim.

The black curve and the green stair-case lines show the relationship between the value of skills and actual compensation. Your earned pay reflects the improvements of your skills. Companies do this in a zig-zag way: sometime over-paying and sometime under. The gap between these two lines cannot be too wide for too long. Either you will find a new job that pays your market rate, or the company will fire you for not giving your money's worth.

Once in a while, opportunity knocks and you change job, usually for better pay. You will find yourself in the red square area. Three possibilities explain your newly elevated wealth status. You may have recently acquired some skills, or have found a market for those you already had, but not appreciated well enough. In this case, you would have jumped from the black curve to the blue one and started climbing the new light-blue ladder.

Or, sadly, you may have simply got the raise that would have come just few months later from the old job: same curve, same ladder. In this case, you are being "golden hand-cuff'ed." You cannot leave until your skills have caught up with your pay. While you are so hand-cuff'ed, you lose the option to jump to the blue curve.

Ask first, when you are thinking of a new job, if you will be learning new skills. Don't ask if it pays better. You compensation will keep up with your skills, sooner or later. If you are not learning new skills, then you are simply being harvested.

Computer server makers that do not carry Solaris please name yourselves.

Wow! http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2007-11/sunflash.20071114.3.xml

IT 168, a Chinese new media interviewed yours truly. I guess it is my and their best interest to increase hit rates.

So, please click http://focus.it168.com/200711/11/index.htm to view.

Late 2005, I attended OSS Global Emerging Technology Executive Summit in Taipei. I presented that Sun's Solaris, newly open-sourced then, will be a perfect foundation for an economy that has a large OEM/ODM element. Two years later, I spoke at ICOS 2007 (International Conference on Open Source), again organized by III (Institute for Information Industry).

This time, Sun has thrived much more. Not only Solaris, Java and SPARC are also open-sourced. And ODF (Open Document Format) is now an ISO standard. Sun is now iconic in the open-source community, defining new territories and enabling possibilities. I felt the buzz in the audience. First time in their memory, a complete stack CPU, OS, development environment, and productivity tools for a wide range of solutions are available at their fingertips. Add own innovations, stir with good business senses, sprinkle finance to personal taste, no need for wheel re-invention, and a business will flourish. This is exciting.

We talked about an embedded system choosing SPARC for the processor. We talked about collaborative programs with universities on system design courses. We talked about possible new business surrounding this new eco-system. We were all excited.

The afternoon panel was on ODF. The audience, a roomful, had no mercy with the government. "Of course we will adopt ODF," responded one official. "We just need to manage the transition." The audience was not patient with the pace. I was grinning wide, but trying hard not to show.

What fuse individuals into teams? What make a team more than the sum of its members? What is morale?

This, about 300 Sun's Beijing engineering employees gathered to celebrate its 5th birthday. We broke down organization barriers and formed cross-functional teams. Each team then chose their own members to compete in spirit and lightly athletic events. We can feel the buzz of competitiveness from the opening ceremony procession. Every team has a chant and, as usual, they all came up with some catchy phrases, some even did a skit.

The stadium can barely contain the spirit. None of the events were highly challenging. But if a team want to win, they must study the rules, strategize, practice, and practice more. I watch the serious faces discussing the finer point of the approaches. There are cheerleader's, coaches, and, of course, members carefully selected to compete the event.

When the event started, the stadium burst: cheering, screaming, yelling, laughing. Few minutes later, the event over, each team re-grouped, analyzed their new standing, strategized against their new target competitor, and moved on to the next event. There were no dull moments with adrenaline pumping fast.

Diann was part of the rope-jumping team. I paid her a compliment when they won. After all, it has been few decades since she jumped rope. "All those girls behind expecting me to go through without missing a step," She said. "I cannot possibly let them down." She rubbed her thighs, slightly sore from over-exerting, as she recalled the event.

There are no individual events. People are linked together in various creative ways. All of them required a bit agility. But teamwork and practices, which require teamwork, is the clear winning factor. And the winning is always sweet.

The climax came at the final tug-of-war, the only outdoor event. The scratching rope screeched in protest when both sides brought on the tension. When the whistle blew, the rest of the world disappeared. The rope grit into my hands while my feet dug into the asphalt. Each cheer somehow forced a bit extra out of me. I can feel the other side's rhythm and their every straining muscle.

And the deciding moment came always in an abrupt way. Somehow, one team's rhythm got a upper-hand. Each cheer amplifies the wave and one crumbles the opponents, frequently make the winning team lose their footing too. The joy of triumph, after giving everything in yourself, is beyond description.

I felt great. High-fives all around, every face was smiling. I don't care about the outcome of the event. Here I have a great team.

Let's do it again.

It seems to be a world election year; Taiwan exhibits the same media-political craze. Mr. Hsieh, went into a 13 days radio silence, then emerged to propose a presidential debate on the platform of United Nation membership. Mr. Ma, his Nationalist Party rival candidate, refused combatively, "It is about economy. Stupid." The sound-bite caught on. Everyday, newspapers headlined with a "It is about ... Stupid" variation by another politician.

Across the strait, the Communist Party is having its 17th National Congress. Five years ago, at the 16th Congress, Mr. HU JinTao became the new leader of China; this once-in-five-year event is really the equivalent of a presidential election. World media swamped Beijing. Taiwan people, however, exhaled with big relief hearing Mr. Hu's message hinting "peaceful unification."

This congress expects to put Hu's successor in place. Few political stars candidates, this Congress clearly focused on economy. The announced plans are scarily grandeur: high-speed railways, agricultural revolution, integration of mega-cities, anti-corruption resolutions, even more impressive infra-structure projects than the Olympics, and, of course, the Olympics.

Intel focused on economy too. Last April, Sun appeared on IDF (Intel Developer Forum) the first time. Pat Gelsinger had me on his keynote. Seven months later, John Fowler walked on the stage with Pat in San Francisco IDF, and myself, few weeks after, with Kirk Skaugen in Taipei. The exciting news is the advent of Sun's X4450.

This cool new server features 4 quad-core CPUs, half the height, twice the memory, everything hot-swappable. For data-centers that are tight on space and electricity. It give customers the needed flexibility. Of course it runs the world's best operating systems: Solaris. It also runs Windows, Linux, or VMWare just fine.

Intel and Sun collaborated on Solaris too: virtualization, power management, performance optimization, and development tools. The new xVM technology made use of Intel's VT. Solaris performance took full advantage of Intel's processor capability. Of course, there is no point burning the energy when the machine is not fully loaded. Solaris uses Intel's DBS (Demand-Based Switching) to throttle power consumption to make data-centers greener.

Few TV camera teams dropped by and interviewed those on the booth. On that night, USTV (非凡電視) had a segment late in the evening. It seems the other one will air on YouTube. In addition to TV, Sun also got nice press coverage and healthy attendance to our messaging sessions. An article showed up on CSDN and another one on ZD Net already.

My Gold Sponsor session attracted about 50 people, just few heads less than the neighboring Microsoft's. Taiwan's developers got an overview of Sun, Solaris, its complete virtualization range, and the new OpenSolaris distro model. I fielded few questions at the end and found high interest level at the academia.

I can feel Sun's momentum at this IDF. Media, foot-traffic, audience, suppliers, and academia all showed interest I did not see just few years ago. It is also intellectually interesting for me to observe that, for the same election year intensity, China brutally focused on economy and Taiwan ideology.

Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC Universal, said that piracy account for over US$60 billions of business loss. He wants it fixed.

For making 25 songs available for download, the court decided that Jammie Thomas need to pay RIAA US$220,000. Ms. Thomas, a Minnesota resident, is an native American single mother. This fine will devastate her financially. RIAA succeeded deterring people from sharing their music. But would it reverse the revenue downward trend?

To watch Hollywood TV shows, people have very few choices in Beijing. Most people go to a store near them and buy a box-set of the entire season (or even the whole series). They spend, on average, about US$10 for the box. They also show up work next day bleary-eyed after the overnight TV marathon. (Stay away from those addictive Korean soap operas!)

The alternative is to download the episodes as they air in the US: usually commercial-free and in HDTV quality too. The younger generation will be talking about Heroes the very next day it airs in the US. Files spread the campus faster than the juicy she-dumped-him-over-him-over-the-weekend.

In fact, teenagers rarely buy CDs and almost never watch TV these days. Mr. Zucker's problem is not piracy at all. He cannot stay relevant to the new generation and cannot replace the revenue if he offers the contents free. He is stuck watching the business decline.

Mr. Nan (南), a software executive here in Beijing, had an idea:

Every kid I talked to had a problem choosing from these two options. Everyone, however, will abandon their illegal BitTorrent download immediately, when this alternative exists.

I think Mr. Nan's vision — individualized media contents on demand — is right on and it is only a matter of time for the content industry to adopt a similar model. Mr. Nan and I went on to debate which of our employers is better suited to the new era. I quoted Jonathan (always a good idea to agree with your CEO) to claim the infrastructure part of the transition.

Emerging Markets Summit Press Kits

This job requires Pacific crossing many times a year. Each trip takes about 16 hours, door to door. Shackled on that chair, I always imagined my life leaking out through those jet engines into that vast water below.

Quickly, I learned to load up reading materials prior. I also grab from the tray when boarding the plane: International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal, and whatever local newspaper. A copy of San Francisco Chronicle came onboard this time. As I flip to Sports Green and Datebook, I found this front-page article on exactly the event I came to Menlo Park for. Wow! Pretty cool. Read it yourself.

On August 29th, Sun hosted an Emerging Markets Summit. The message is simple: as Internet liberates consumers by giving them information, it also becomes the defining factor of economies. Those emerging markets are leapfrogging their 1st world counterparts with aggressive deployment of cell phones — the pervasive and ubiquitous accessing device to the Internet. Consumers, instead of enterprises, drive IT industry now. USA, with its mere 300 millions citizens, will gradually yield the center stage to more populous countries.

Sun has a unique strategy. We try hard to level the playing fields for everyone. We believe the world is better off when all players compete fairly. Sun will win in the arena that only innovative skills count. With this mantra, Sun open-sourced its software and hardware technologies. We also promote open standards that do not favor any enterprise or country.

We found many friends in those emerging markets when we told them this strategy. Revenue growth soon followed. With successes, Sun plowed back into these market with more R&D. These engineers innovated and contributed back to Sun and their local communities. It is a positive feedback loop.

Imagine the contrary protective strategy. Keep technologies close and proprietary so that customers are locked in. To guarantee no leakage, no core components leave their US-based headquarters. Off-shore centers are minimal and engaged with only menial tasks.

But technologies and products advance quickly. When the next lifecycle arrives, customers would have learned the lessons and choose open solutions. In emerging economies, there are a lot more new businesses than old enterprises. Entrepreneurs learn during their tenures in old enterprises and observe each others closely. The lock-them-in-and-don't-share strategy just does not work, at least not in these markets.

This Boeing 747 settles into the auto-piloted cruising pattern. Passengers start to deploy boredom-fighting techniques. This is a same torturous trip. But I felt satisfied and fulfilled before I drifted into the comatose state.

Few years ago, I read Jim Collins' Good to Great and Built to Last. One of my key take-away was: successful companies must negotiate through several transitions in their ascensions to greatness. The organization learned how to change and adapt. I have been observing organizations big and small for year; they all resist changes.

There have been many quarters that we are operationally cash positive. Now we are GAAP profitable. There is a collective jubilation at Sun that we have turned this corner. Sun is changing, at an accelerated pace this coming year.

Changes, of companies, has 3 elements: the environment, the strategy, and the execution. (Many argued the 4th element: people. I think that is a duh. Of course everything needs good people.) Changes are all painful. The best changes seem easy after.

• Environment

  Greg Papadopoulos observed that some computing needs can be met simply by waiting for the Moore's law. (Computing power roughly doubles every 18 months or so.) If the needs grow less fast, just replace the old systems with cheaper, faster, and better ones.

  

  On the other side, some computing needs are so huge and growing so much faster than Moore's law that computing capacity is the competitive advantage against the competition. Greg called these needs the Red Shift applications.

• Strategy
  

  We want many, many people to use our technologies and products. We want to make it as easy as possible. OpenSourcing our software technologies is an element of this strategy. We also encourage employees to blog: more contacts, better.

  The volume will turn into business. We have already seeing signs of this and the result will be ever more impressive in the coming years.

• Execution

  The clairvoyant observation and brilliant, yet simple, strategy are nothing if we cannot execute. For Sun, execution means Innovation, Courage, and Pace.

  Sun will not out-spend or out-number our competitors, all much bigger. Fortunately, in the industry, size is less relevant to winning. The Computer History Museum has seen the demise of many large companies that lost to their smaller rivals. In this industry, a company must innovate and change faster to win. This means the courage to act decisively. And, as Jonathan said to many VPs, the courage to collaborate.

  Then there is the less glamorous jobs of resource optimization, tasks prioritization, delivery to plan, and coordination of details. This is the machine, the factory, where the rubber meets the road, and how things really happen.

This year guarantees blood, sweat, and tears. Only the victory at the end will make them sweet.

Every ERI managers, or manager-wanna-be, please read this.

Perfect, Crawford, as usual.

To understand the little storm I got myself into, try Google "擠掉微軟." This CNET report won me many new friends. It also accentuated my oh so un-sophisticated blemish: saying what's on my mind without much polishing.

Sun believes the world is polarizing. On one end, the prolification of mobile devices is making the Net truly ubiquitous. Billions of people carry a gadget that does email, checks stock prices, downloads music, navigates neighborhood, and enables voice communication over distance too. More! Cars, stereos, game consoles, appliances, light-switches, etc. are all silently connecting. The number of connected devices are growing exponentially, much faster than Moore's law. Greg Papadopoulos calls this phenomenon "Red Shift" — borrowing the astronomic term describing the speed the universe is expanding at its outer edge.

On the other end, the age of utility computing is arriving: slowly and surely. A few generations from now, companies owning their own data center will seem as absurd as they owning power plants. Yes, 5 companies will still. But that's about it.

At the same time, decades of effort has succeeded putting a computer on every (corporate) desktop. This means desktop computing has effectively become a commodity. Fundamental economic theories dictate no fat profit for anyone and only few large ones survive to the final equilibrium state. Observe the number of desktop/laptop manufacturers in the world. Can you count to ten? Try to find out how much Lenovo paid for their Windows licenses in China. Fat profits no more.

This polarizing world is where Sun shines. Our creative hardware engineers have come up with great products over the years. They continue to re-define the rules of the game and lead the industry. We also have Solaris — the most advanced operating system on the planet. By open-sourcing it, Sun joined the community that Linux is in. Linux and Solaris are siblings to begin with; they are quite compatible. Through virtualization, you can even run Linux applications on Solaris unchanged. Together, Solaris and Linux should be able to dominate server rooms, or the future computing grids.

I will be realistic: Microsoft is not going away. But the existence of much cheaper alternatives has one sure effect: bring down the price for everyone. This is how economy works. Unlike Sun, they do not have the impressive lines of platforms to compete in an open arena. Hence squeezed.

Maybe I will tone down next time I meet the press? Yeah, right.

Back in 2004, we were gearing up to ship Solaris 10. It was clear then that Solaris 8, released in about 2000, was enormously popular. We found that customers were reluctant upgrading to the new version. The reasons came down to two: they were not compelled to upgrade and they worried that their applications will no long run.

Sun was the victim of its own success. Solaris releases were solid, high-performing, secure, and robust. It worked and never broke. Why change a good thing? Besides, think Windows, everytime they upgraded, something stopped working. It takes hardwork and heart-aches to find and migrate to new solutions. If desktops are so painful already, imagine the same ordeal for servers. Oh no. We are not taking the new OS. Thank you very much.

I know Solaris 10 is backward compatible. I was part of the development team and oversaw many projects that went in. Solaris engineers watched new code like hawks. They would not allow any interfaces to be broken. Customers who do not upgrade will miss out the great savings, better efficiency, extra security, performance improvements, etc. that come with Solaris 10. How does Sun entice our customers to give it a try, without the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) of compatibility?

Sun decided to guarantee it. Simply put, if the binary passes AppCert, Sun guarantees it will run on Solaris 10 without any modification.

It is open sourced, it has better features, it is high-performing, it is secure. And it guarantees compatibility. Why wouldn't everyone upgrade?