Geoff Arnold

Two weeks on the road

I'm just starting what should be a seamless two-week business trip - Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Denver. However because the two weeks were scheduled and booked separately, I'm actually going to pop back to Boston next weekend. (Back on Sunday, departing Monday.) It'll give me a chance to reload my suitcase....

So right now I'm in Menlo Park at the Sun campus for four days of meetings: an all-day DE review, a couple of days on storage technologies, and a number of 1-on-1s.

Explaining "Crazy Ivan"

Everybody at Sun is blogging about the "Crazy Ivan" announcement. As JohnnL put it, "This morning we announced our entire server-side software portfolio will be free of charge and open source. Not pieces, all of it."

This shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone. Look at OpenOffice, NetBeans, GlassFish, and OpenSolaris: the trend is inescapable. Even so, a lot of people (including Sun employees) have been skeptical; during my travels in the US, UK and India over the last few months, the "open source question" has been raised more than any other. Here's how I've usually responded to it:

In an ideal world, we'd like to sell our software to two different audiences for two different prices. We'd like to sell it to developers for zero dollars, because we want their adoption of our technology to be totally frictionless. And we'd like to sell it to enterprise deployers for as much as possible, because we think it's worth that much. However we can't sell the same thing for two different prices - it's impractical, and in some jurisdictions it would be illegal. (Only the airlines get to do that.) The only way we know how to solve this puzzle is to give away the bits for free and charge for support.

[And if someone decides to deploy without buying a support contract, they probably weren't a genuine prospect anyway - for us or for our competitors. But they're still generating demand for Sun-compatible products and services.]

Bringing up ZFS on my Ferrari

As I mentioned, I wanted to check out ZFS now that it's finally available in the latest Solaris build. My plan was simple: to upgrade my Ferrari to Nevada B27 and then "blow away the Ubuntu partition and create a couple of 10GB partitions" to test ZFS. Well, it wasn't quite that simple.

On Monday I borrowed a B27 DVD from a colleague and upgraded my Solaris partition. This went just fine, although I did run into a fiddly little xscreensaver bug that meant I had to snarf the B28a version of the Xorg bits. Never mind: I was now ready to repurpose that 20GB Ubuntu partition. But how? Solaris format/fdisk wouldn't touch it. I booted up a Ubuntu LiveCD and used Linux fdisk: this let me change the type code to 0xbf, which is Solaris2, but Solaris still wouldn't see it.

It turns out that Solaris only recognizes one primary Solaris partition on a drive; you can't have more. So on Tuesday I rebooted the Ubuntu LiveCD and used fdisk to delete both the Solaris and Linux partitions (leaving WinXP untouched). I then created a new partition, and reinstalled Solaris from scratch; I sliced up the partition as 20GB root, 1GB swap, two 10GB slices for ZFS, and the rest in /export/home. Of course I now had to customize the system the way I like it, so I downloaded a ton of stuff, went home, and got things working during the commercial breaks while watching House.

Finally this morning I was ready to test ZFS:

zpool create -f test c1d0s5 [the -f flag because the Solaris installation had put a UFS filesystem on the slice]
zfs create test/tfs
cd /test/tfs

Verdict: if you want to experiment with ZFS, it's a lot easier on a desktop machine where you can simply plug in another disk. You can use a laptop, but the chances that your disk layout will be appropriate are pretty slim; you should be prepared to repartition your disk and reinstall. Once you do, it all just works - kudos to Jeff and the team.

OK, next step is to try mirroring:

zpool create mtest mirror c1d0s5 c1d0s6
zfs create mtest/tfs
cd /mtest/tfs

Assuming I can free up a few hours on Monday...

Like most of us in Sun, I've been waiting for ZFS to arrive. Now it has. So on Monday I plan to update my Acer Ferrari 3400 laptop to Nevada build 27. Right now it's set up to triple-boot Nevada (50GB), Ubuntu Linux (20GB), and WinXP (10GB). I'm going to blow away the Ubuntu partition and create a couple of 10GB partitions which I hope will be sufficient to let ZFS show its paces. (However if anyone has a tried-and-tested laptop configuration for demoing ZFS, I'd welcome a link. No point in reinventing things.)

Dale's on board

My colleague Dale Ferrario (with whom I travelled to Hyderabad and Bangalore) is now blogging. Hey, Dale: if you need a picture for your template, I have plenty from the SeeBeyond party.... :-)

Day 8 - welcome to Sun for the SeeBeyond team in Hyderabad

Today was the first of two days of meetings with the staff of the former SeeBeyond operation in Hyderabad. On this occasion I was tagging along with Dale Ferrario, VP of Sun's business integration software group. (Dale and I go way back: he's been at Sun 18 years - almost as long as I have - and he's taken on an even more diverse collection of jobs than I have.) After we'd met with the site manager, Sunil Bajpai (pictured below with Dale), and had a tour of the facility, the entire crew drove over to the Sheraton where we had an all-hands meeting followed by a party.

The party started with some wild fun and games outside in the dusk. (Trust me: that MC in the middle of the circle is about to get things really fired up. Unfortunately it was too dark to capture the action photographically. Imagine a combination of "Simon says", a rugby scrum, tag, and Twister!)

Sunil and Dale.

A sudden cloudburst drove everybody inside. Here's the whole gang, in two shots because I couldn't persuade them to move back enough to fit into one.

And finally here is a 2.4MB QuickTime video clip of everybody saying "Hello!!!" to their colleagues in Sun.

Planning for travel

It seems to be a rule of business travel that (a) there will always be one "gotcha" that requires replanning, and (b) events will expand to fill the available time, and then some. Originally I was going to go to England for a couple of days of meetings, then fly on to Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Pune, before flying home to Boston. First, I discovered that my planned visit to Pune would overlap the festival of Diwali, which would make it a no-op (or worse). OK, let's turn things around. Hyderabad is a fixed point, so fly to India first, visit Pune, Hyderabad, and Bangalore (in that order), fly back to England, have my meetings there, and then fly home. And just as that was settling, it turned out that I needed to add another meeting in England, up in Leeds; in addition, some of the people that I had planned to visit at the start of the trip wouldn't be available at the end. So expand: tack on one day at the front to accomodate a stop-over in England, and add another day at the end for the new meeting in Leeds. My fingers are crossed, but I think everything is set: I'll depart on October 16th and get home on November 3rd. I have one completely free day (a Sunday), so don't expect a tour-blog....

(And my deepest thanks to Susan for wrestling with the stupid travel system. At this moment, their portal is still showing the itinerary as it was a couple of days ago, even though there have been half a dozen changes since then. Fortunately Galileo gets it right.)

Doonesbury on travel arrangements

See my earlier comments on the frustrations of dealing with incompetent travel agents. (You don't want to hear about the way they tried to screw up my simple trip to L.A. earlier this week.) Today's Doonesbury was priceless:

(And now I'm going to India... should I interpret this as a warning of some kind?)

A good week

I'm in the middle of packing up before I check out of the hotel and head up 101 to the airport. I thought I'd blog for a moment before putting away my PowerBook. It was a good, productive week here in California. Picking out the highlights, I got my annual performance review out of the way, spent some time with Greg Papadopoulos on my plans for the rest of FY06, visited SeeBeyond in LA, and had the chance to present a status update on my work with StorageTek to Jonathan Schwartz and his staff. One consequence of these meetings is that I'm now putting together plans to visit the UK and India at the end of October.

But now I must unplug my laptop and prepare for another trip on a Song bird....

Visiting SeeBeyond

I'm visiting SeeBeyond in Monrovia, CA* today. SeeBeyond builds enterprise application integration solutions for a wide range of customers using some really cool middleware technology they've developed - check out their website for details. They were acquired by Sun last month, and ever since the deal closed I've wanted to talk to them. This morning I flew down from San Jose to Burbank** on SouthWest*** and drove down the Foothills Freeway to Monrovia. After introductions, and plugging in to the local network (which is mostly hooked up to SWAN - still some 10.* addresses to worry about), I talked with a group of managers and directors about Sun's technical grade structures, including the DEs, Fellows, and Technology Directors. Then this afternoon I met with a smaller group of directors to share some of what we've been doing at StorageTek and discuss whether any of it could apply to SeeBeyond. I found the exchanges very useful: I think we're off to a good start.

As with StorageTek, it's important to avoid the "I'm from the Government; I'm here to help" attitude. The last thing a bunch of engineering managers who are under schedule pressure want to hear is a lecture on the value of horizontal communications or an admonition to send off all their top people for ARC duty. The goal is to learn from each other while keeping the customer satisfied - not a mindless Borg-like assimilation.

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* Yes, I was confused by the name too - Monrovia sounds like it belongs in Transylvania, not West Africa. However this Monrovia is a suburb of Los Angeles.
** Of course I'm of that generation that automatically prepends Beautiful downtown whenever I hear Burbank. The curse of pop culture....
*** First time on SouthWest for at least ten years. Of course I'd planned to fly jetBlue, but our functionally challenged travel agents couldn't figure out how to book it....

No names, no pack-drill

[Company policy, and contractual obligations, mean that I have to conceal a few details. Never mind - the message will be clear.]

I've always thought that, next to banking, the most mature kind of applications software was in airline ticketing. Like many of you, I've visited airline websites and seen the fare for a particular flight change from minute to minute , often quite dramatically. I've read about the principles of "yield management", and the anecdotes of how one passenger winds up paying a thousand dollars more than another in the same class on the same flight. And I've seen the commercials for the various companies that promise to find you the cheapest flights, hotels, cars, and so forth. Clearly there's some powerful software at work here: indeed were it not for the fact that "Artificial Intelligence" has come to mean "that which we don't know how to do yet", this would seem to qualify.

And yet...

Hard on the heels of my recent trip to Colorado, I now have to visit California for a week. I prepared a budgetary estimate, filled out a travel request, received an authorization number, and sat down to book the travel. (Those of you still living in the 1980's might imagine that my admin or secretary would do this. You can go back to sleep now.) Like most large companies, Sun has contracted with a Large Travel Service Company That Cannot Be Named so that employees can book their own travel through an exquisitely-customized on-line portal.

I logged in, and selected the page for travel planning. (Jakob Nielsen would love this page; it violates almost all of his design guidelines.) I entered the dates of my outbound and return travel, as well as the origin and destination airports. The system offers two ways of planning air travel: choosing each flight individually, or configuring complete round-trip itineraries. I knew that whatever I did the system would follow up by attempting to find a cheaper alternative, so I asked for complete itineraries, sorted by price.

After thinking about it for nearly a minute, the system offered me several choices. Oddly, the cheapest of these wasn't a particularly good fit with my chosen travel times, and it was several hundred dollars more than what I've paid for my last few trips from BOS to SFO. (This also meant that it was well above the budgetary estimate that I'd provided. Oops.) I backtracked to the flight search page, and tried searching for individual flights. I found a pair of flights that looked like the cheapest (though you can't tell for sure until you've chosen), and was $50 less than I'd budgeted. Bingo! But wait! "Your choice violates policy: a cheaper alternative was not chosen." But the [expletive deleted] system refused to tell me what the cheaper alternative might be!!. After trying several times to guess what might make it happy (without once finding a cheaper combination), I chose an override option and completed my itinerary. I'm not going to go into the "Fatal resource error" during my hotel search; let's just say that the whole procedure took me nearly an hour, including substantial duplicate data entry.

So to my divisional controller: if I spent a couple of dollars more than I should on the flight, I'm sorry. I'd love to know how I could have done better, though if you factor in the cost of my time.... And to the Large Travel Service Company That Cannot Be Named: evolve or die. Outsourcing complexity to patients and providers may be an odious but winning strategy for managed care companies, but a travel agent can be replaced in a mouse-click. As for whether this violates any blogging policy, I can't imagine that it does. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this kind of thing affects every large company. As Jonathan has discussed in his blog, the best measure of quality is the customer recommendation index. It's worth remembering that this applies to our suppliers as well.

And as for the trip itself, I'm going to be travelling on an airline that I've never used before! But that's the subject of another blog entry. Now, has anyone got any cheap A.I. software that they want to unload?

Starting conversations

Today we had our "geek-to-geek" meeting at StorageTek's Louisville, CO campus. Originally I'd planned to hold a brief and informal get-together for a few senior engineers; instead it evolved into a full-blown day-long colloquium involving more than 50 engineers (and two lawyers). Not all are in the picture; a few were slow getting back from lunch, and one was balanced on an SUV taking this photo! Of those attending, about a third were from Sun and two-thirds from StorageTek.

The schedule was tight: an hour and a half for a series of brief introductory presentations; a break followed by a lively Q&A session; lunch (of course); then break-outs from 1pm to 5pm. There were ten hour-long break-out sessions on topics ranging from product processes to storage virtualization. Amazingly, we stayed on schedule, for which kudos to the speakers. Obviously the presentations and break-out sessions weren't long enough to dive really deep into specific technical and business issues, but that was never the intent. The point of this meeting was simply to make connections and start conversations, and in this I believe we succeeded. The next step is to broaden the participation and link the discussions to the organizational and product planning processes. The work is just beginning....

Anyway, my thanks to all those who participated, especially to those who made particular travel-related sacrifices to attend, and to my colleague Richard for handling the facilities. I owe you guys.

P.S. Over dinner after the meeting, I was talking for a long-time StorageTek employee, and I mentioned that I was planning to blog about the events of the day. We discussed the fact that StorageTek, like many (?most) companies, had a tradition of secrecy, even over minor matters. For some, Sun's open style - "living life in public" - is likely to be a culture shock. So this evening after I'd drafted this blog entry I applied my usual test with more care than usual: Should I be concerned that a malevolent marketing type from HP might read my blog and use the contents to disparage Sun to our customers or anyone else? I don't think so.

Partying, networking

Yesterday was the first of two big days in the Sun+StorageTek integration work I'm doing here in Colorado. First, we gathered most of the employees at StorageTek's Louisville facility and Sun's Broomfield campus in the courtyard at Broomfield for executive speeches, food, music (too loud, but never mind), networking, and celebration. That was from 10 to 12. Then in the afternoon we had a couple of "geek to geek" sessions on file systems and the application of crypto techniques to storage. The second of these ran until about 8; I brought in some food and beer to help the discussions. (The beer caused some confusion: Sun and StorageTek policies are different. But we're all Sun now.)

Today we're having an all day colloquium with around 75-80 55 participants, drawn from all over Sun. We'll have a morning plenary session, with break-outs this afternoon. I'm looking forward to this: the energy levels and enthusiasm seem to be really high. More anon (perhaps with pictures - another policy issue to resolve).

Calling all StorageTek bloggers

If you work at StorageTek and you're a blogger, or if you know of colleagues who blog, please add a comment to this posting or drop me an email. If you've been a stealth blogger, or if you're concerned about Sun's attitude towards blogging, please check out the policies on public discourse and privacy. You don't have to host your blog at blogs.sun.com to be a part of the Sun blogging community: many of us maintain our independent blogs and make them available for aggregation via RSS.

Approaching the end of a hectic week

As I mentioned, I'm visiting the StorageTek facility in Louisville, Colorado this week and next. I find that there are two distinct aspects to what I'm doing here. The obvious bits are the formal meetings - reviewing engineering processes, planning various meetings between Sun and StorageTek engineers* (including a big colloquium next week), and coming up to speed on key programs and technologies. Those are keeping me pretty busy. Less obvious are the ad hoc interactions, on topics ranging from programming tools to document archival, from differences in IT infrastructure to the various techniques used for gathering customer requirements.

If you think about it for a minute, the task of integrating two large companies is truly daunting. There's a fine balance to be struck. At one extreme would be treating StorageTek as "separate but equal", operating it as a wholly-owned subsidiary with little or no day-to-day interaction. At the other extreme would be Borg-style "assimilation", submerging all traces of StorageTek's culture and practices. Neither is appropriate to this situation. StorageTek is a successful, profitable company, highly regarded by its customers: it's critical that we preserve that. But both Sun and StorageTek have been limited in what we can do historically: Sun because of an incomplete approach to storage, and StorageTek by a "plug compatible" business model that inhibited innovation at the edge of their systems. The value of the merger is that each company offers new possibilities to the other. Together we have more choices: more ways to address the acquisition, processing, and storage of data from end to end. For me, the way to achieve the right balance is to encourage the business unit managers to conservatively adapt the organization, projects and products to ensure business continuity, while at the same time developing a network of the key innovators - architects, researchers, engineers - to open up the possibilities of radical synergy.

Back to the daunting nature of the task. Like all such endeavours, the elements usually turn out to be simple: meetings of individuals or teams to identify and solve pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. And the ad hoc interactions provide the "jiggling" that allows the pieces to fit together (or sometimes identifies a piece that's in the wrong place). We never budget for these activities, but without them it's really hard to finish the picture.

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* Yes, I know that we're all Sun now, but I need some language to refer to the two groups. Maybe oSUNW and oSTK, for "originally Sun" and "originally StorageTek".

Back to Colorado

I flew out from Boston to Denver this afternoon for a ten-day visit to StorageTek. I have an unusual role in all of this, with one foot in engineering and the other in human resources. My main objective is to facilitate the smooth integration of the Sun and StorageTek engineering communities. Now as you'd expect there are groups busily working on what the merged organization structure should look like, who reports to whom, and what the engineering deliverables are; similarly there are HR teams mapping job grades and benefits and stuff like that. I'm not trying to duplicate their efforts. My focus (colleagues might call it a long-standing obsession) is on connecting the engineering community: bringing together creative engineers who might otherwise be isolated in "stove-pipe" organizations, fostering the kind of conversations that create new opportunities. For me, the person who put it best was Lou Gerstner of IBM. Here's an excerpt from an interview with BusinessWeek about his book Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?

Q: In the book, you use the phrase "counter-intuitive corporation." What do you mean?

A: There is this view that has been prevalent for as long as I've been in the business world that large companies are slow, ineffective, and that small companies are faster, better, more entrepreneurial. I don't buy into that. It's harder to make large companies faster, entrepreneurial, more responsive. But it doesn't mean they can't be that way.

This is probably the subject of another management book, but this is all about creating organizations where knowledge moves in a different way than control. Large companies have to have elaborate systems of control because there's lots of things to count, oversee, report, and add up. You create this kind of skeleton of an organization, which keeps it upright and moving. But you don't want knowledge, which is what people really leverage in a large institution, moving along the same pathways as control.

You've got to free knowledge so that it moves horizontally in an organization, not hierarchically, and allows organizations to leverage the fact that they have a big presence in various markets so they know things. That knowledge can move across the enterprise. Smaller companies have no way to leverage information.

So that's what I'm up to, in a variety of ways: fostering the horizontal flow of information. To me, that's what makes the difference between a bunch of engineering teams and an engineering community. And we're not just talking about product development: this has to include research, development, manufacturing, pre-sales, consulting, and support. More anon.

A heavy hand, or bad engineering?

Tom Yager of Infoworld recently reviewed Microsoft's first attempt at a 64-bit operating system. While most of the review was unexceptionable, a couple of comments really irked me:

"Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition debuted with an anemic shelf of 64-bit apps. Skeptics will rejoice to learn that 64-bit Windows isn't load-and-run compatible with many, if not most, 32-bit Windows applications.... Windows x64 runs 32-bit applications stably or not at all; it won't allow an incompatible app to install or load. This is neither Microsoft's heavy hand nor bad engineering. It is genuinely impossible to run a great many 32-bit applications directly on AMD64 and its Intel derivative in pure 64-bit mode." [My emphasis.]

Now this last point is simply false. As I replied to Tom:

"I'm typing this email into Mozilla Thunderbird on an Acer Ferrari (AMD Athlon 64) laptop, running Solaris 10 in 64-bit mode. The Thunderbird executable that I'm running is 32-bit:
/usr/local/lib/thunderbird-1.0.2/thunderbird-bin: ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386 Version 1, dynamically linked, stripped
(It's the same binary that runs quite happily if I boot into 32 bit mode.) However the "ls" command is 64-bit:
/bin/amd64/ls: ELF 64-bit LSB executable AMD64 Version 1, dynamically linked, stripped
So far, I personally haven't encountered a single 32-bit Solaris application that won't run under 64-bit Solaris."

So how come Solaris 10 can mix and match 32-bit and 64-bit processes* while Microsoft can't? As my colleague James Carlson said, it's:

"... mostly because of a great deal of effort that happened almost a decade ago when we originally switched to 64-bit kernels, and continuing work since then to make sure everything just works right.... I'm sure that Windows users hope that one day MS approaches that level of maturity."

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* OK, it's true (as James pointed out) that Wine doesn't work (yet) on Solaris 10. However I don't really think of Wine as an "application". I really can't think of any 32-bit Solaris x86 application that won't run in 64-bit mode - but if there is, I'm sure the blogosphere will know.

It was 20 years ago today...

Today's the 20th anniversary of my arrival* at Sun - July 29, 1985. What title to choose for this blog entry - the obvious Beatles quote, or the Grateful Dead's "What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been"? Obviously both apply. Anyway, it's been a wonderful roller-coaster ride - and just as important, I'm still having a hell of a lot of fun.

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* I've already blogged about the circumstances, so I don't need to repeat myself.

Mentoring

Our mistress of mentoring, Katy Dickinson, has just posted a status report on the FY06 SEED mentoring program: "we have 35 of the 71 SEED Engineering Mentoring participants for 2005-2006 matched with mentors." I'm really proud of the fact that I'm going to be mentoring two of those participants, both based outside the US. As a non-US citizen, based 2700 miles from the company headquarters for all of my 20 years at Sun, I've always been especially sensitive to the issues that arise when you're a remote worker: when your preferred keyboard layout is not "U.S."; when you have to be able to exert influence without hanging out in the cafeteria in Menlo Park or Santa Clara; when you have to remind people to use fully-qualified domain names in their URLs, because not everybody is in the ".sfbay.sun.com" domain. I hope I can be of use to the folks I'm mentoring this year; I'm also really looking forward to learning from them. For me, mentoring is a two-way street.

Getting ahead of the system

In his blog today, Jonathan responds to a frustrated developer who wanted to take advantage of the advertised deal on our new workstations:

an Ultra 20, fully loaded with Solaris, and the entirety of our Java developer platform and runtime infrastructure for $29.95/mos - and get the hardware for FREE"

...only to find that when he tried to order it, the actual price was $360/yr. (Not a big deal for most people, but it would be for some - and more to the point, it wasn't what had been promised.) Jonathan's mea culpa explanation: it was...

because our internal ERP systems were implemented at a point in time where no one could imagine a Sun product with a monthly price vs. an annual price

And even though it would be nice if this kind of thing didn't happen, the alternative is worse. People at the cutting edge - with products, developer initiatives, solutions - should always be pushing the envelope, challenging what the traditional corporate processes and infrastructure can handle. Personal case in point: when I joined Sun back in 1985, all of our products were hardware boxes. I don't think we even had a software product on the price list (except perhaps a 3270 terminal emulator - different world, eh?). My team created PC-NFS, the first NFS client solution for DOS-based PCs. (This was before Windows; back then Bill Gates was hot for Xenix!) In June 1986 we shipped our first revenue units, and within a few days the first customer service call came in.

I've got a question about this PC-NFS product I just received.

Certainly, sir. Can you tell me the serial number on the box?

Er... OK, there's a license number printed on the label on the software box - is that what you want?

No, sir: I need you to tell me the system serial number of your Sun computer. It'll be next to the power switch.

But I'm trying to install PC-NFS on a Compaq Deskpro.

I see. Well, perhaps you can give me the serial number of the file server.

That won't help. The file server is a Pyramid system. We don't have any Sun hardware at all.

I'm sorry, sir: without a system serial number I can't log your call.

!@#?<>*&%$#!

The rest of the support network was in place: we just hadn't got around to changing the front-line process. And nobody had envisaged the possibility of selling Sun software into an account without any Sun hardware. (Sounds familiar, Jonathan?) In any case, the support process was straightened out with commendable speed. Should we have held up product shipment until all the infrastructure glitches were worked out? No way.

Sun blogging

One problem with blogs is that for the most part you only get to see the words. Some people put up a picture of themselves, but that's it. Now you can see what some of the Sun bloggers look - and sound - like. Sun marketing put together a little newscast-style six minute video clip on blogging, and a copy is now on the mediacast site. (4.3MB RealVideo format.) [Originally it was hidden behind a fancy dynamic interface; we had to teach the STN folks about the need for durable URLs.] Anyway pull down a copy and watch Claire, Tim, and Jonathan talking about blogging at Sun - why, what, and how. Good stuff.

Open everything!

Congratulations to my colleagues who were involved in today's OpenSolaris launch. The biggest single OSS release in history! From Sun!! (A tip o' the hat to Rob Gingell, wherever he might be.) But surely Microsoft, IBM and HP aren't going to take this lying down; they're not going to give in without a fight - are they? C'mon, you guys: I want to see OSS releases of Windows XP, z/OS*, and VMS! And... oh heck, why not throw in OS/2 Warp as well - just for old time's sake? (But don't bother with AIX or HP/UX, because... well, I'm sure I don't need to spell it out.)

And why stop at operating systems? Earth to Larry (probably in his jet somewhere): it's time to open source Oracle before IBM gets around to opening up DB2. You know it makes sense! In fact, I bet there's more lines of code in that sucker than everything else put together!!

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* I want to try running z/OS on my laptop. A quad-boot setup with Solaris, Linux, z/OS, and WinXP: that's a configuration to really get a geek's pulse racing....

SUNW+STK: now this is going to be interesting

We just announced that we're buying StorageTek. Over the years Sun has bought a number of companies, but this is a new scale of acquisition for us. StorageTek is a 7,000 person $2.2B company that was founded in 1969 - the year after I got into the computer business, and 13 years before Sun was established. Integrating the two corporate cultures is likely to be challenging - and stimulating - for all concerned. Nevertheless this feels like the right move for Sun.

"It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper told the band to play"

I just received an email beginning:

Dear Geoffrey:

Congratulations on your 20 years of service with Sun!

In recognition of this milestone, we are pleased to offer you an award for your contribution and dedication to our company. To view your award options, please visit the website below. [Etcetera.]

Who'd have thunk it? [And come to think of it, where did that expression come from?]

I remember one hot summer day going to see Barry Folsom at the Sun sales office in Waltham. Barry had just been hired by Bernie Lacroute to head up the planned-but-as-yet-unstaffed East Coast Division of Sun. I asked Barry if his job offer was still open (he'd tried to hire me into the Rainbow group at Digital); he responded by asking me if I had any thoughts about how to accomodate IBM PCs in this new Network File System stuff that Bill Joy, Bob Lyon and Rusty Sandberg had come up with. "Yeah, I think so; I've been looking at NFS for our [Mosaic] OS," I mused, and the rest is history.

Whither Pat?

One of my favorite ex-Sun execs seems to have been ousted by her new employer, Salesforce.com. The Register reports Prez Sueltz leaves Salesforce.com: "One source said Sueltz was 'devastated' over the parting of the ways with Salesforce.com. Sueltz joined the firm believing she would be groomed for the CEO position. Sueltz did not return our call seeking comment."

Although I didn't work directly for Pat in Sun Software or Service, our paths crossed frequently; several of the Town Hall meetings that she held here in Burlington turned into Geoff'n'Pat shows. During the stressful uncertainty that accompanied the big layoffs at Sun in the years after 9/11, I always felt that Pat understood the human side of things better than any of her colleagues.

When Pat first joined Sun, I was a little surprised (and a bit concerned) to see that she was was less confrontational and assertive than some of her peers (and certainly less than her predecessors - anyone remember JanPieter?!) Gradually I came to appreciate how effective she was in working behind the scenes, achieving her goals by patient persuasion, loyalty, and coalition-building. In talking with her it was clear that, despite her relatively low-key style, she cared passionately about what she was doing. I hope this latest event is only a temporary setback.

UPDATE: Looks like I was slow on the uptake - this story hit two weeks ago. I guess El Reg only just picked it up.

Disclaimers, guidelines, policies and the like

With the publication of IBM's blogging policies, there's been a fair amount of discussion on the internal Sun bloggers' alias about our own policy. Tim Bray has a piece on the subject over at ongoing. I've never bothered with a disclaimer on this blog, since (1) it's not hosted at blogs.sun.com or any other Sun site, and (2) I have always felt that if a lawyer was out to get you, the degree of protection provided by a disclaimer would fall in the category "None at all".* Nonetheless I have reluctantly decided to follow my colleague, and have shamelessly plagiarised the disclaimer from ongoing. I've also taken the opportunity to reorganize the sidebar, eliminate a few placeholders that I never got around to creating content for, and generally do a bit of spring cleaning.

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* From HHGTTG:
"Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?"
"How much?" said Arthur.
"None at all," said Mr Prosser.

What does this mean for iWork?

Many, many Sun employees are now working from their homes in every corner of the USA world. Many have chosen to live in low-tax states. How is this New York ruling (reported in Slashdot) going to affect this? Will Alaskan telecommuters wind up paying California income taxes if their VPN connections terminate in Menlo Park? Once again, technology meets tax policy, and the result is going to be a mess....

"hal9000(jr) writes 'The Boston Globe is running this story on an out-of-state programmer working for a New York company who had to pay state taxes. ''New York has the right to tax 100% of a nonresident employee's income derived from New York sources,' according to the 4-3 decision by Court of Appeals. The court relied on a fairness rule called the 'convenience of the employer' under law that says a worker's income is taxable if he chooses to live outside the state, as opposed to if he or she was transferred there.' "

SEED meeting

I'm involved in Sun's engineering mentoring program, known (inevitably) by its acronym SEED (Sun Engineering Enrichment & Development), and today we're having an all-day meeting for the participants, both mentors and... hmm. What word should I use? I know that some people use mentee, and I've even seen it in a dictionary, but it doesn't work for me.

Anyway, we've got various speakers scheduled, including executives and domain specialists. There's also going to be a session consisting of short presentations by the mentees program participants. As I blog this, Greg Papadopoulos is reprising his CEC presentation "The Future Is Not What It Used To Be", in which he highlights the shift in software/service business models and the implications for innovation within the company.

Naturally this is a distributed meeting. Most participants are in our Menlo Park campus, and the agenda runs from 9-5 Pacific time. There are five of us in a conference room here in Burlington, Massachusetts; we're going to have to decide whether to stay until 8pm, taking into account the winter storm that is bearing down on us....

[UPDATE: After a careful risk analysis, I drove home around 3:20pm; it took me about an hour. It started out as snow; by the time I got home it was ice, ice ice. And now I'm dialled back in to the meeting.]

[Blogged on my Ferrari running Solaris 10, using the web interface to my blog. Now I need a good Solaris blogging tool, as good as MarsEdit on my Mac. And despite Alec's comment. I don't regard EMACS as an alternative. Maybe it's a platform on which to build a solution, but...]

Looking for the plus-three-sigma customer

A reference in Marion's blog sent me off to a fascinating piece by James Governor: Why Sun Software Licensing is Like a Hermann Miller Chair. He starts with the counter-intuitive fact that some customers are reported as saying that our flat-rate pricing for JES is "confusing". Governor makes the point that the confusion comes not the pricing model but from its unfamiliarity. He cites Malcom Gladwell, who argues in his new book, Blink, "that it's a mistake to rely on the first impressions of customers who are inherently biased against the unfamiliar" and that "focus groups hold back, rather than encourage innovation."

Like Governor and Gladwell, I'm skeptical about the use of focus groups in the early stages of developing radical product and business concepts; I see more use for them in refining and evolving well-defined products. Rather than focus groups, I prefer the "voice of the customer" approach: standardized, semi-scripted interviews with an opportunity for open-ended responses. In addition to supporting the usual statistical analysis, VoC encourages what I call "the plus-three-sigma customers" to speak their minds. These are the folks who are out ahead of all the other customers - and usually ahead of us too! They're the ones who aren't confused by the unfamiliar, and who tend to be impatient with groupthink. To return to Governor's piece, they're the folks who would grab that ugly Aeron chair and and see at once how to build their workspace around it. They're our natural collaborators in exploiting innovative and contrarian technologies.

Scott's back

The Register just gave Scott some space to share his Xmas dream. Although it's pretty goofy, it's nice to see the old familiar Scott back. (A little gentle bashing once a year isn't going to hurt.) Memo to Jonathan: the "11 words" are necessary but not sufficient. And Scott clearly has his priorities right: he wants "an NHL hockey season ticket and a new set of irons to knock a couple of strokes off my handicap" I think he'd settle for just one NHL game....

An embarrassment of riches...

One of the joys problems with all of this cool stuff that we have at Sun is figuring out how it all fits together... or doesn't. Case in point: I was reading John Clingan's piece about Zones on an E25K, and I started to think about how one might use such a beast. Suppose one was running a horizontally-scaled load-balanced Sun Java System Application Server Enterprise Edition 7 2004Q2 (surely there must be a simpler name) configuration on a cluster of V880s. Can I rehost this in a collection of zones on an E25K? What works? What breaks? How much of my administrative model carries over, and how much has to change? (Everybody talks about ABI compatibility, but compatibility of administrative models is just as important. It's one of the major issues with Linux today, and it's bound to affect how we run Linux apps in Solaris x86.)

And that got me thinking about clustered data bases (we use the Clustra technology to support App Server failover), and from that to storage and file systems. (I'm an old NFS guy.) One of Sun's hidden gems is QFS (OK lawyers, Sun StorEdge QFS software), a massively scalable high performance file system. Although designed for (and mostly used in) high performance technical computing, it's getting a lot of attention in other applications, due in part to the symbiosis with SAM-FS (Sun StorEdge SAM-FS software), a policy-based archiving system. (Think SarbOx. Think Infinite Mailbox.) Do QFS and SAM-FS work in zones? I turn to the on-line documentation: Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Solaris Zones: "Mounting File Systems in Zones: Options for mounting file systems in non-global zones are described in the following table. Procedures for these mounting alternatives are provided in Configuring, Verifying, and Committing a Zone and Mounting File Systems in Running Non-Global Zones." Followed by a long table, which doesn't include SAM-FS or QFS. Hmmm. Can't tell from this. More reading required, I guess. And so it goes.

There's nothing wrong with this. It's just an inevitable combinatorial explosion, exacerbated by our commitment to preserve backward compatibility. (In other words, you can never take a feature out of Solaris.) The challenge is in managing unrealistic expectations. (It isn't all going to work together seamlessly from day one; in fact some combinations may never work together. It all depends on the business case.) The upside lies in the opportunities for serendipitous synergy. (Or should that be synergistic serendipity?)

Register 1, Merrill Lynch 0 - game over (on Sun & RH)

My colleague Jim Grisanzio noted Ashlee Vance's piece in the Register about the Merrill Lynch analyst who thinks Sun should buy Red Hat or Novell. Surprisingly, Jim only cited the Merrill Lynch argument; he failed to mention Ashlee Vance's devastating rebuttal. Key quotes (with my emphasis):

Merrill Lynch ignores how messy Sun's purchase of a Linux vendor could be. We doubt that open source zealots would warm to the idea of Sun controlling the dominate [sic] version of Linux as quickly as the analyst firm suggests. We doubt that IBM, HP or Dell would let such an acquisition happen in the first place.

Merrill Lynch's myopic focus on what Red Hat might mean to Sun is also totally absurd. The entire IT community would be shaken by such a buy. Sun would pay a premium for something it doesn't really need. It can ship Linux on servers just as easily as Dell can.

Backing Linux in a major, major way would make Sun look like every other vendor, and this is not a role Sun is well suited to handle. At times, it seems that Sun exists for no other reason that to be different from the herd and offer customers a choice.

This last point is important. As I've mentioned before, people expect Sun to be the industry's creative, iconoclastic contrarian. A "me too" Sun would confuse (and disappoint) them. We at Sun need to meet this expectation in our conversations with them - this is simply cluetrain 101 stuff. And this fits with Ashlee's bottom line:

Sun has got to out-invent, not out-acquire its rivals to be "hot" again. Customers will pay more attention to a screaming fast, cheap Opteron box that can run either Solaris x86 or Red Hat than they will to Sun buying an expensive open source software unit in Raleigh, North Carolina.

I out-eek Alec Muffett

alec muffett :: dropsafe :: articles : life : I have worked 1/3rd of my life for Sun Microsystems (12 out of 36 years). For me, the numbers are 19 and 54, meaning that I've worked here for 35% of my life. "eek", indeed. I'm still having fun, though....

Travel plans (slightly updated)

In a couple of weeks I'll be heading back to my birthplace for a Jini Community meeting. It should be a lot of fun....

Nit-pickers will notice that although the graphic shows West End tube stations, the the earlier, misleading graphic has been updated. The original version is still to be found on Jini.org. Graphics notwithstanding, Jini Community Meeting itself will be at The Brewery in the City of London, near Moorgate and the Barbican.

'Bye Rob - and thanks

After over 19 years working at Sun, you might think that I've seen it all. But last week I experienced a personal "first": my boss, Rob Gingell, left the company. I was so gobsmacked that I checked back to make sure that this was indeed the first time that this had happened. Of course many of my former bosses have left the company (or, in the case of Phil, been tragically snatched away from us on 9/11), but in every case they'd had the decency to wait until I was no longer working for them.

I've never really understood why we're always so secretive about people leaving companies. (I actually held off writing this piece until Rob had assured me that his mug-shot was on file at his new company.) After all, people come and go for all sorts of reasons, and it shouldn't be a big deal. Rob, like me, had been at Sun since 1985, and after 19 years it's hardly surprising that he was interested in doing something new. But we never announce these things, even internally (unless the person is retiring), and I think this has two unfortunate consequences. First, people tend to interpret secrecy as meaning that you're trying to hide something. ("Oo-er! Rob just quit! I wonder why?! What did he know that I don't know? Should I be worried?!") 99% of the time, the answer is, quite simply, no. (And the other 1% there isn't anything you can do anyway.) Second, by keeping things under wraps we lose the opportunity to celebrate the person's accomplishments and thank them for their contributions to the company. Sure, a few of us may take them out for a drink, but that's inadequate recognition for someone who's touched as many lives as Rob did.

Having violated the taboo, let me say a few words about Rob. I think I first ran into him in 1986 when he was giving a talk on the recent rewrite of the virtual memory system for SunOS (the BSD-based precursor to Solaris). I remember two things from that: his distinctive speaking voice (with the pitch rising steadily through each sentence), and the elegance of the design he was presenting. Over the years we met frequently, particularly after I became a DE in 1991. He was instrumental in the mammoth Sun-AT&T Unix unification effort that became SVR4 and then Solaris; he was a passionate advocate for Java and the community process that underpinned its development; he became the CTO of the software organization; and then in 2002 he was appointed to a newly-created position: Chief Engineer, reporting to the CTO, Greg Papadopoulos.

Rob talked about his new job in an interesting interview with David Berlind of ZDNet, in which he identified his charter as conceptual integrity: "My goal in life is to make sure that all the brains [at the various Sun campuses] are effectively employed and create as much as they can. If only one person creates the ideas, you only get one person's worth of ideas. I'd much rather have 30,000 people's worth of ideas. [...] I actually hope that it's never true that the herding cats phenomenon vanishes from Sun. Some of the chaos you're referring to is what makes us interesting and vital, and keeps us from getting locked into a "we're doing this because we did it last week" mentality. That level of chaos, while it's annoying at times, is also fairly powerful because it's the product of having all those brains usefully applied. Where it's a negative is when you have no way of arbitrating the chaos [...] which I did locally in the software group for many years. It's a new scope expansion to consider doing it for everything all at once."

In the same interview, Rob spoke about his vision of how Sun was evolving. "When I say we're working on our second-generation systems, our first generation was about practicing this [developer feedback] loop with Unix. [...] The Solaris applications catalog is essentially 100 percent of any Unix applications that exist. [...] When we talk about the next generation, we're just talking about another instance of this circle that's based on Java, where the developer number is already at three million. The apps space is only beginning to appear in some areas like your Java phone. [...] All of our initiatives around things labeled SunOne are really about translating that into market share for us so that we can start to see this develop into a self-sustaining ecosystem." It was this vision of Sun's "second-generation" of Java-centric network computing that led me to come to work for Rob a year ago.

I know I speak for many at Sun when I say, "Thanks, Rob, for your engineering leadership, your inspiration, and your friendship. Clear skies and smooth rides..."

Mobility

Tim wrote: "Bluetooth? I think it hits the sweet spot for me. I’d totally love one of the hot new phones with high-speed flat-rate data that I can leave in my bag. Then I stick a Bluetooth headset over one ear, and then have my computer connect through it so I’m really on the Net all the time.

But... iPod? Blackberry? Texting? Not for me, thanks; at the moment anyhow. Are there others like me?"

Today I use a Nokia 3650 phone and my PowerBook. Both support Bluetooth. The phone has a (primitive) camera, and I can easily transfer the photos to my PowerBook and into iPhoto. I also use Romeo and Veta Universal to use my phone as a wireless mouse for the PowerBook. I sometimes use my phone to display speaker notes during presentations, which I transfer from the PowerBook. I'd like to sync my PowrBook's iCal calendar into my phone, but I haven't yet taken the time to sync Sun's EdgeCal service with iCal. I don't use my phone as a modem, not because I can't but because people tell me it's far to easy to run up enormous phone bills. (I don't have an "unlimited data" plan.) All of these features use BlueTooth.

iPod? Yes, I have one: I love it for long flights, or walks; I also play it through my car stereo. Texting? Not outbound, but absolutely inbound. I have EdgeCal set up to send a text message to my phone 10 minutes before every appointment, including location and phone number (for phone conferences). Not only does this work when I'm not online; the discreet "beep" is a great way of initiating a graceful end to my previous meeting, so that I can actually get to the next one on time! (An alien concept to many, I know.) And I definitely use the browser on my phone for ad hoc information - headlines, stock prices, sports scores (GO SOX!!!), flight schedules. (Oh, yes: I use text messaging to get flight and upgrade notices.)

Having said all this, I'm probably going to switch to the Treo 650 when AT&T Wireless starts shipping the GSM version. Better screen, cleaner browsing, more apps, usable games.... I've tried games on the Nokia 3650, but it's really not quite usable - partly because of the quirky circular keypad. I figure that the Treo 650 should be almost as usable as my GameBoy Advanced.

How people see Sun

A couple of days ago I posted a piece entitled "No, but God, we'd love to!" which I said captured what I want Sun to be, and asked Jonathan if he was listening. He was, and he asked what I meant. So here goes.

Over the years, I've talked to many of Sun's customers (as well as companies that ought to be our customers!). Now maybe it's just because customers get bemused by my job title, but I find that most of these conversations follow a pattern. Quite simply, the customer expects to talk to Sun about how the hard problems in computing are going to be solved. Of course there may be contemporary issues to be discussed - a product release, a support problem, a pricing gap - but underlying it all is the expectation that Sun's the company to talk to about the future technology of computing. Not just the future of business models, or the future of supply chain management, or even the future of intellectual property. Moreover the conversation is usually about the big picture, about a "we" that embraces Sun, our customers, and our partners and competitors. It's not simply about Sun's perspective, or Sun's products. I get the impression (and sometimes the explicit assurance) that it's a very different conversation from that which they have with IBM, Microsoft, HP, Dell, EMC, Cisco, or Oracle.

This shouldn't be a surprise, of course. Ever since I've been with Sun, we've had noisy, energetic, contrarian technologists on the front lines - folks like Bill Joy, Tom Lyons, Rob Gingell, James Gosling, Greg Papadopoulous, John Gage, Andy Bechtolsheim, Jim Waldo, Whit Diffie, Michael Powell, Graham Hamilton, Hal Stern, Randy Rettberg, Bert Sutherland and many others. And they're not just emeritus uber-geeks: they are building stuff. Cool stuff. Today. They're changing the way people think about problems. And customers recognize that. The upshot is that when I visit [name deleted] we're not just talking about the features of the next point release of a product; we're discussing the big picture, the hard problems that we are all wrestling with, customers and suppliers alike.

Now of course the great challenge is how to monetize this. It's no good if the customer takes the fruits of our conversation and buys a bunch of Dell 1Us, slaps Red Hat on them, hacks some JSPs on Tomcat and rolls out yet another DIYIT ("do it yourself IT") solution. And (pace Slash-Dot) the answer isn't for us to simply open-source everything and trust in the beneficence of Eric's Bazaar. But neither is it to focus on proving that JES on Solaris on Athlon or Niagara can be as cheap as Red Hat (with the help of a creative pricing model). We need the pricing model, but if we lead with pricing instead of technology, customers will be confused.

Fundamental customer perceptions of a company don't change rapidly, if at all. IBM is still "Big Blue" ("Father knows best"). Microsoft is still a PC software company; we got so used to rebooting regularly that we expect it. HP is still about printers and (deep down) scientific calculators. And Sun? We're a company of creative, contrarian, imaginative, curious geeks. We're the guys that zig when everybody else zags. We're "The Network is the Computer". We have to figure out how to leverage that, use it as part of our business model, while being careful not to behave in ways that blatantly conflict with that image. Because being seen as a the company whose response to a thorny problem is, "No, but God, we'd love to!" is priceless.

19Y@Sun

I just noticed that an anniversary slipped by last week. My start date at Sun was July 29, 1985. Time flies when you're having fun....

When I joined the fledgling East Coast Division, there were five of us: Barry Folsom (ex DEC, VP ECD), his admin (whose name I forget), Sharon (HR), and Kim (who, like me, was ex-Mosaic). For a few days we borrowed one room in the Sun sales office in Waltham; it held three chairs, so two of us had to be travelling at all times. Eventually we moved into some rented space up the road, on Winter Street in Lexington. Our offices weren't actually adjacent, so we came by one midnight and strung some (unauthorized) Ethernet cable through the suspended ceiling panels. My desktop machine was a Sun-1, called "suneast"; my phone line doubled as our UUCP connection to the outside world. A few weeks after that we moved into a new building in Lexington, and I published the existence of suneast to the world. Life was good.

"No, but God, we'd love to!"

While surfing a random* blog, I came across a quotation that captures exactly what I want Sun to be. Jonathan, are you listening?

But there's no reason why you can’t create a service organisation of people who all just "Get it." Virgin do this brilliantly. I recently had to travel to Mumbai. I called Virgin and asked if they flew there. "No," said the booking woman, "but God, we'd love to!"

In those few words you realise that this person (who can supposedly be replaced by a few lines of online shopping code) was actually party to the kind of decisions happen in Virgin boardrooms. Of course Mumbai fits their brand perfectly - a hip, glamorous town with the world's biggest movie industry. She understood that as well as anybody on their board.

I'm not saying we should get all reactive, chase off in all directions and become defocussed. But there are many challenging and exciting problems out there, and we should WANT to try to solve them even if we pragmatically choose not to go there. Like the Elephant's Child in Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, I want us to have "satiable curtiosity".
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* Well, not exactly random. This is the blog of Brian Millar, the guy who created the brilliant Powerpoint Hamlet, as well as other masterpieces such as the ultimate Father's Day card.