Interviews, Updates, etc.

I got to speak with David Brancaccio a few days ago - whose public television show NOW is definitely worth watching. If you're a long time listener of the US's National Public Radio, you'll recognize David's voice. To me, he'll always be the voice of the bubble - the business journalist who reported on the economy as the stock market went through the roof in the late 90's. Just hearing him speak puts me in a (cautiously) good mood... The interview aired last night. For those interested in my views on the business motivations behind bridging the digital divide (and Vinod Khosla's views on a potential remedy to the global oil crisis), you can watch or listen here. While you're there, please take the time to visit this page. Last week was full of real news, too - we broadened our flagship Java developer tool, NetBeans, to better support web developers with its simplified Visual Development Pack. And although it's not earth shattering, the rumors are true: we're now shipping a power meter with our Try and Buy Niagara systems - folks didn't believe the power savings (even with PG&E standing behind us), so we thought we'd simplify the analysis for potential customers. The Postgres community also pushed a new version of their open source database out the door. I'm starting to see a major uptick in the commercial adoption of open source databases. Greenplum's a great example - a business intelligence/data warehousing solution based on Postgres, and general purpose infrastructure (Thumper and Solaris 10). See page 14 of this document for an interesting comparison of how those two products perform together against their peers. I finally had a positive meeting with an investor related to our open source strategy (developers get it, investors have had a harder time). The key? I had the perfect picture with me - actually a mashup. Stay tuned, I'll show it here next week. In the interim, I just saw this yesterday - great to see the OpenSolaris community making headlines (and congratulations, Anil!): (Click here if you can't see the video below.) Finally, given the flood of emails my last post generated, along the lines of "did you read the comments about how hard it is to do business with Sun as a small company?" let me just say this: I and portions of my staff spent a good amount of time talking about those comments last week. And minimally, if you take a look at the new sun.com site, you'll see we are committed to improving the experience - for startups and titans, alike. We know we have work to do beyond the web site, and we will do so. (And to address one issue - given US export laws, and widely varying non-US commercial restrictions, there's unfortunately no way we can coordinate the availability of programs like Startup Essentials globally - we do try...) So thank you for the comments. I do read them all.

Date: December 10, 2006
Category: Main

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