Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Win-Win Situation

I'll offer you some of my CEOrish advice (Ashok says that CEOrish is a non existing word, as if he knew everything about English... Besides, my friend Pointy Haired Boss uses it constantly).

Well, as I was saying, I'll offer some examples of what is a win-win situation, although some situations seem to be the opposite. In summary, this is a scenario where everybody wins, so it is an ideal situation. That's what we search when we offer our technology to our customers. They pay us good money (which seems bad to them as they spend it, but it isn't!), so we earn our living, and our customers win a lot more because they leverage their businesses with our technology.

Some recent examples of other Win-Win situations, that doesn't seem so, but I'll explain why they are winning scenarios for everybody.

Yesterday, our former executive vice president of global sales and services, Don Grantham, left the company to join HP as chief sales officer. It seems that HP wins here and that we loose, but this is not the case. We all win.
From now on, we have someone in the HP headquarters that will defend Solaris as another operating system to be sold in the HP platform (just take a look at Jonathan's blog, he explains it all), so we are expanding our visibility and gaining a new channel partner.
Besides that, we are restructuring our internal organization, creating new divisions focused on emerging markets, and we are in a huge effort to cut expenses, and as you may imagine Dan had a huuuuge salary... so we are really thankful to HP to take care of Don's salary from now on (well, just after we have delivered Don's severance of about $6M or so... everything to keep my salary untouched).
Another reason why this is a win-win situation: our shares plunged after Don's leaving was announce. This is great as I was planning on buying a huge amount of shares, I mean, Sun is planning to buy its own shares (I cannot do that right now, we are in quiet period and that would not be legal nor fair to our shareholders), so we'll do it by way much less money than we though.

So, finally everybody wins, even HP, that will be compelled to use Solaris, a real OS in their crappy computers... This a clear example of a win-win-win-win... situation, everybody wins.

Want some more example of a win-win situation? A dream ticket, Obama+Hillary. This would be a great win-win: Obama would win, Hillary would win (and would be able to pay her campaign debts), and the Dems would win by going back to the White House.

For us would also be a winning situation: we'd had a young innovator politico in the House, someone to perform a complete overhaul to our country and our political system, while having someone with real experience to back him in tough times. A win-win for everybody, except perhaps for the old McCain...





The picture of the SunRay included here?
Well, I just felt that I had to add some additional pictures to make
the entry more attractive, so I guess it is nice to add some self propaganda.
Another win-win situation...

1 comment:

T. said...

This guy at HP wouldn't happened to be named Gregory, "Greg", would it? :)