6 ms·

Sun’s Chief Executive Tweets His Resignation

81 points by asnyder 17y ago

basugasubaku 17y ago
In case you cringed at "nytimes.com" and came to the comments hoping for a direct link to the tweet, here it is: http://twitter.com/OpenJonathan/status/8620937722 http://twitter.com/OpenJonathan/status/8620937722
- pavs 17y ago
  Why would you "cring" at nytimes.com when they linked to that tweet in the 6th line of the article?
  - basugasubaku 17y ago
    I guess I could have left that out. Sometimes they ask for login, sometimes not; but I cringed and came to the comments hoping for a direct link myself.
- shrikant 17y ago
  "[S]eems only fitting to end on a haiku" seems a rather generous interpretation of the meaning of the cliche "seems only fitting".
  - paulgerhardt 17y ago
    The gesture may not have been entirely hollow (in Jonathan Schwartz's mind). Ellison is known to have a thing for feudal Japan: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/23/60II/main601722.shtml http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/23/60II/main601722.sh...
joshu 17y ago
This is awesome.
paulgerhardt 17y ago
While this conforms to the popular 17 syllable rule, I would argue it is not technically a haiku because it is weak in providing an evocative image (related to nature) which in turn conveys a sublime mix of emotions. The 17 syllable thing is more of a guideline. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_in_English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_in_English Apologies for nitpicking, the bigger story here is obviously the resignation of the CEO of Sun rather than the manner in which he did it.
- alanthonyc 17y ago
  I'm with you on this. The "haiku" is overplayed. Nature is needed. And also, not to forget, the common form of response.
  - DannoHung 17y ago
    I eagerly await a web site for communicating in sonnets.
    - paulgerhardt 17y ago
      Yes, but can you write it in 14 lines of Clojure? =D
- patio11 17y ago
  If you were doing Japanese poetry it might be a senryuu rather than a haiku. In English, I think a fair case can be made that the word "haiku" means something different than 俳句 does, and that's OK. (For one thing, your notion of a syllable as an English speaker is related to the mora Japanese counts by, but they're not the same thing, even when counting for corruptions of English words. Patrick is 2 syllables, パトリック is 5 mora. This means every haiku you've ever heard much longer than is "acceptable", for a certain very proscriptivist form of "acceptable".) This is a topic of accidental interest to me because one of my undergrad theses was on autogenerating haiku. (If there were a Turing test for haiku, one my program wrote is better than anything I've ever written. The next hundred were crappy. The great thing about it as a CS problem is that haikus force the reader to do so much of the work that as long as you have a good dictionary of seasonal terms to work with mashing a few of them together may actually result in something pretty, even with a very minimal understanding of grammar.)
JacobAldridge 17y ago
Am I the only one who thinks "Tweets his Resignation" is sensationalist, link bait bs? On Jan 27 he tweeted a link to "likely my last blog at Sun" - http://twitter.com/OpenJonathan/status/8312583611 http://twitter.com/OpenJonathan/status/8312583611 And that blog made it clear that with the Sun / Oracle transaction having closed he was on his way. Even that's hardly news - you can't really have two CEOs, so someone was always losing that title, and Sun was the one taken over.
- axod 17y ago
  I agree @ title. Sadly it's just how the media works. "Twitter bullying! New phenomenon! Be afraid." "Guy dumps his wife on twitter!" "Man finds his long lost son via a tweet" "How a startup was born out of a single tweet" "How terrorists are now using twitter to coordinate attacks" I think the problem is that some people view twitter/internet/latest big thing to be mysterious/worrying/game changing. It rarely is. Also of course some people just see <hyped keyword> and assume it's amazing new news unprecedented.
wheels 17y ago
Hmm, more like: Financial crisis / The last nail in the coffin / CEO no more It seems disingenuous to blame the fall of a company that's been floundering for a decade on the present climate.
- bensummers 17y ago
  How could giving everything away for free while hoping that people buy support contracts possibly be a bad strategy?
  - bad_user 17y ago
    That's not what killed them ... * they sold SUN/Solaris servers, until the market started preferring cheap x86 stations with Linux installed * while their moto was "the network is the computer" since before anyone saw that, they failed to ride the cloud ... it happens with companies way before their time * they had a great start with Java applets but they weren't a company of creatives, like Macromedia/Adobe, and so they missed this opportunity * Eclipse and the whole open-source community around Java practically took away their ability to sell any Java related tools Open-sourcing Java was a good decision ... it was out of their control anyway. Open-sourcing Solaris was also a rational decision ... who would've used Solaris when Linux gives you almost everything Solaris does, and for free too? Open-sourcing Netbeans was the only way to compete with Eclipse ... look at IntelliJ ... even they decided it's not in their interest to keep the core closed. What they failed to do is to monetize these freebies with complementary commercial products. JavaFX is free? Cool ... why not sell a tool for designers that competes with the Adobe Flash environment? Solaris is free? Cool ... sell kick-ass development / management tools that are only available for Solaris. They also had the resources to pull something like Amazon's EC2 or Google's App Engine ... based on Solaris, Java and MySql. I wouldn've liked that, but they didn't Instead their bet was on support contracts. But big enterprises that go for this are going with IBM instead, which has a lot more resources. And small companies prefer to get their support from free online help channels, like IRC/mailing-lists.
    - rbanffy 17y ago
bensummers 17y ago
I prefer a version by an ex-Sun employee: "A thing of beauty / trampled by a philistine / he blames all but self" http://twitter.com/pgdh/status/8626616015 http://twitter.com/pgdh/status/8626616015
- rbanffy 17y ago
  I have to agree. When you have the top job, it's all your fault. It's his fault that Sun was vulnerable, that it's market share eroded, that its product line was not competitive and so on. Sun was indeed a thing of beauty. Its fate is a sad thing and the fact that things like these happen diminish us all.
  - joshu 17y ago
    I dunno. I once met some SunSpot developers at a conference (perhaps it was a Maker Faire?) and I asked when the Spots would be for sale. One of the developers explained that they had a warehousefull, but had a lot of problems getting organizational agreement on how to sell the units (they aren't servers, etc.) They eventually found they could sell them the way the company sold t-shirts. $500 t-shirts, anyway. tl;dr: company can't sell things even when they want to.
- ShabbyDoo 17y ago
  From my perspective, the issue was with execution, not strategic values. Recall the SmugMug guys struggle to use Sun hardware. Not only could they not get someone from sales to return their call, but they had a heck of a time even getting the devices set-up in their datacenter. http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/05/16/sun-honeymoon-update-storage/ http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/05/16/sun-honeymoon-update... How many things must have gone wrong so that a config UI requiring a non-obvious, redundant magic string could have gotten out the door? Edit: The "jumped the shark" moment was when, at JavaOne, Sun claimed it would build the world's largest app store by installing nagware along with the JVM.
davidmurphy 17y ago
Goodbye Sun / Hello moon / it's time to go to bed
jrockway 17y ago
So Java is basically a dead language now, right?
adrianwaj 17y ago
Oracle now is Software and Hardware, Complete this Sun never saw ---- Bye bye Jonathan Hi ex-playboy Ellison IBM, HP?
MikeMacMan 17y ago
"Longer run, with a few million businesses and a few billion consumers on the Web, rumor has it there are some interesting opportunities to be had.” I really don't like this guy.
mscantland 17y ago
It is insulting to this company's employees that Schwartz still doesn't get it. This tweet is characteristic of his failure to view the world as it really is, and to sell something that customers will pay for. Oracle, IBM, HP, Apple, etc are not going out of business in this economy. Investing billions to give software away (Java, MySQL, NetBeans, etc) in some far-fetched hope that it would cause customers to buy extremely expensive systems hardware didn't work, and everyone seems to know this but Schwartz.

81 points by asnyder 17y ago

In case you cringed at "nytimes.com" and came to the comments hoping for a direct link to the tweet, here it is: http://twitter.com/OpenJonathan/status/8620937722 http://twitter.com/OpenJonathan/status/8620937722

pavs 17y ago
Why would you "cring" at nytimes.com when they linked to that tweet in the 6th line of the article?
- basugasubaku 17y ago
  I guess I could have left that out. Sometimes they ask for login, sometimes not; but I cringed and came to the comments hoping for a direct link myself.
shrikant 17y ago
"[S]eems only fitting to end on a haiku" seems a rather generous interpretation of the meaning of the cliche "seems only fitting".
- paulgerhardt 17y ago
  The gesture may not have been entirely hollow (in Jonathan Schwartz's mind). Ellison is known to have a thing for feudal Japan: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/23/60II/main601722.shtml http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/23/60II/main601722.sh...

joshu 17y ago

This is awesome.

paulgerhardt 17y ago

While this conforms to the popular 17 syllable rule, I would argue it is not technically a haiku because it is weak in providing an evocative image (related to nature) which in turn conveys a sublime mix of emotions. The 17 syllable thing is more of a guideline. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_in_English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_in_English Apologies for nitpicking, the bigger story here is obviously the resignation of the CEO of Sun rather than the manner in which he did it.

alanthonyc 17y ago
I'm with you on this. The "haiku" is overplayed. Nature is needed. And also, not to forget, the common form of response.
- DannoHung 17y ago
  I eagerly await a web site for communicating in sonnets.
  - paulgerhardt 17y ago
    Yes, but can you write it in 14 lines of Clojure? =D
patio11 17y ago
If you were doing Japanese poetry it might be a senryuu rather than a haiku. In English, I think a fair case can be made that the word "haiku" means something different than 俳句 does, and that's OK. (For one thing, your notion of a syllable as an English speaker is related to the mora Japanese counts by, but they're not the same thing, even when counting for corruptions of English words. Patrick is 2 syllables, パトリック is 5 mora. This means every haiku you've ever heard much longer than is "acceptable", for a certain very proscriptivist form of "acceptable".) This is a topic of accidental interest to me because one of my undergrad theses was on autogenerating haiku. (If there were a Turing test for haiku, one my program wrote is better than anything I've ever written. The next hundred were crappy. The great thing about it as a CS problem is that haikus force the reader to do so much of the work that as long as you have a good dictionary of seasonal terms to work with mashing a few of them together may actually result in something pretty, even with a very minimal understanding of grammar.)

JacobAldridge 17y ago

Am I the only one who thinks "Tweets his Resignation" is sensationalist, link bait bs? On Jan 27 he tweeted a link to "likely my last blog at Sun" - http://twitter.com/OpenJonathan/status/8312583611 http://twitter.com/OpenJonathan/status/8312583611 And that blog made it clear that with the Sun / Oracle transaction having closed he was on his way. Even that's hardly news - you can't really have two CEOs, so someone was always losing that title, and Sun was the one taken over.

axod 17y ago
I agree @ title. Sadly it's just how the media works. "Twitter bullying! New phenomenon! Be afraid." "Guy dumps his wife on twitter!" "Man finds his long lost son via a tweet" "How a startup was born out of a single tweet" "How terrorists are now using twitter to coordinate attacks" I think the problem is that some people view twitter/internet/latest big thing to be mysterious/worrying/game changing. It rarely is. Also of course some people just see <hyped keyword> and assume it's amazing new news unprecedented.

wheels 17y ago

Hmm, more like: Financial crisis / The last nail in the coffin / CEO no more It seems disingenuous to blame the fall of a company that's been floundering for a decade on the present climate.

bensummers 17y ago
How could giving everything away for free while hoping that people buy support contracts possibly be a bad strategy?
- bad_user 17y ago
  That's not what killed them ... * they sold SUN/Solaris servers, until the market started preferring cheap x86 stations with Linux installed * while their moto was "the network is the computer" since before anyone saw that, they failed to ride the cloud ... it happens with companies way before their time * they had a great start with Java applets but they weren't a company of creatives, like Macromedia/Adobe, and so they missed this opportunity * Eclipse and the whole open-source community around Java practically took away their ability to sell any Java related tools Open-sourcing Java was a good decision ... it was out of their control anyway. Open-sourcing Solaris was also a rational decision ... who would've used Solaris when Linux gives you almost everything Solaris does, and for free too? Open-sourcing Netbeans was the only way to compete with Eclipse ... look at IntelliJ ... even they decided it's not in their interest to keep the core closed. What they failed to do is to monetize these freebies with complementary commercial products. JavaFX is free? Cool ... why not sell a tool for designers that competes with the Adobe Flash environment? Solaris is free? Cool ... sell kick-ass development / management tools that are only available for Solaris. They also had the resources to pull something like Amazon's EC2 or Google's App Engine ... based on Solaris, Java and MySql. I wouldn've liked that, but they didn't Instead their bet was on support contracts. But big enterprises that go for this are going with IBM instead, which has a lot more resources. And small companies prefer to get their support from free online help channels, like IRC/mailing-lists.
  - rbanffy 17y ago

bensummers 17y ago

I prefer a version by an ex-Sun employee: "A thing of beauty / trampled by a philistine / he blames all but self" http://twitter.com/pgdh/status/8626616015 http://twitter.com/pgdh/status/8626616015

rbanffy 17y ago
I have to agree. When you have the top job, it's all your fault. It's his fault that Sun was vulnerable, that it's market share eroded, that its product line was not competitive and so on. Sun was indeed a thing of beauty. Its fate is a sad thing and the fact that things like these happen diminish us all.
- joshu 17y ago
  I dunno. I once met some SunSpot developers at a conference (perhaps it was a Maker Faire?) and I asked when the Spots would be for sale. One of the developers explained that they had a warehousefull, but had a lot of problems getting organizational agreement on how to sell the units (they aren't servers, etc.) They eventually found they could sell them the way the company sold t-shirts. $500 t-shirts, anyway. tl;dr: company can't sell things even when they want to.
ShabbyDoo 17y ago
From my perspective, the issue was with execution, not strategic values. Recall the SmugMug guys struggle to use Sun hardware. Not only could they not get someone from sales to return their call, but they had a heck of a time even getting the devices set-up in their datacenter. http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/05/16/sun-honeymoon-update-storage/ http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/05/16/sun-honeymoon-update... How many things must have gone wrong so that a config UI requiring a non-obvious, redundant magic string could have gotten out the door? Edit: The "jumped the shark" moment was when, at JavaOne, Sun claimed it would build the world's largest app store by installing nagware along with the JVM.

davidmurphy 17y ago

Goodbye Sun / Hello moon / it's time to go to bed

jrockway 17y ago

So Java is basically a dead language now, right?

adrianwaj 17y ago

Oracle now is Software and Hardware, Complete this Sun never saw ---- Bye bye Jonathan Hi ex-playboy Ellison IBM, HP?

MikeMacMan 17y ago

"Longer run, with a few million businesses and a few billion consumers on the Web, rumor has it there are some interesting opportunities to be had.” I really don't like this guy.

mscantland 17y ago

It is insulting to this company's employees that Schwartz still doesn't get it. This tweet is characteristic of his failure to view the world as it really is, and to sell something that customers will pay for. Oracle, IBM, HP, Apple, etc are not going out of business in this economy. Investing billions to give software away (Java, MySQL, NetBeans, etc) in some far-fetched hope that it would cause customers to buy extremely expensive systems hardware didn't work, and everyone seems to know this but Schwartz.