Kool Aid Served Daily

I haven't blogged much about company culture and the shock I had coming to Sun. I guess I felt I was integrated. I was wrong. In many ways, I am still an outsider. Day in and out, I sit in my office at home, disconnected from the company hivemind. I sometimes get asked by people outside Sun what the plans are and I feel they get offended when I say I don't know. I'm not holding out, I literally do not know.

Sure, I could look at past actions and what I know about the business to make predictions. But at best, they are just as likely to be correct as an industry analyst. It is like Battlestar Galactica, I don't know the writers/producers, but I can predict where the story arcs are going. Can I be wrong? You betcha, which is why I watch the show anyway.

One of the things which is really exciting me about Sun right now are the UI improvements being introduced between builds 50-55 of nevada. They might have started creeping in before then, but I really started to notice along then. The difference is drastic from Solaris 9 and even Solaris 10. I'm going to write about what I think is going on, but please remember, I'm not representing Sun or even the development engineers.

We had the great browser war and before that we had the great windowing system war. Microsoft seemed to win both. Netscape Navigator won on technical merits, but the masses adopted Internet Explorer. As for the Windows versus X battle, I hated it when I was at NetApp and everyone pretty much had to use Windows and Outlook. We needed the extra internal test cycles on hosting Exchange databases, so we converted desktops to Win 2000 and then WinXP.

I think Sun lost the desire to prove it was the better desktop. Either all the engineers got old enough or turned their attention to other matters. Let the young Linux upstarts do it. And they tried, but they never won. Full disclosure, my home terminal is a WinXP box running PuTTY: a free telnet/ssh client and my backup is Fedora Core 4 Linux. My work terminal is a Sun Ray 1G connected to a Solaris Nevada b55 w2100z box. I went back to WinXP because of games and I'm very happy with PuTTY's interface to the Solaris and Linux servers I have at home.

But a funny thing happened, Apple and MAC OS X showed that you could have a BSD core and pretty UI and win people over from WinXP. The installation of new hardware, the interaction between software, etc, was so easy that non-technical people could do it. I know of a lot of diehard Solaris developers who flocked to the Mac Book Pro. And the remains of Netscape reared their head in the form of Firefox to show that the browser war wasn't over either. Suddenly, it became viable to have a non-Microsoft OS which seamlessly handled multimedia and the Internet.

Now I don't think anyone at Sun woke up and said, "You know, we could grab the desktop." I'm not even sure such secret plans exist. But just as Sun has been pouring Star Office, NFSv4, dtrace, and zfs contributions down the open source well, they have been drawing out the innovations made in Gnome, Thunderbird (the mail client which got me off of mutt by the way), Firefox, etc. And you know what, the Solaris desktop experience is pretty fun. Put a dead quiet Sun Ray thin client on someone's desk and it becomes really pleasant.

I've found that I don't have to turn from my Sun Ray 1G to my WinXP box to go look at something on the web. Or to get a crisp terminal session going. As a matter of fact, I want to retire that box to just being a game box. Or even better, I'll have it dual boot WinXP and some OpenSolaris variant. Or perhaps get Xen or vmware running on it to have it serve up a bunch of OSes. It really doesn't matter, as long as I can kick off a game whenever my son feels like pitting his skills against mine.