Sun Shopping Poll is still open

Well, I just took my medication after the crisis I suffered while writing my previous post, so I came back just to tell you that our poll about which company should Sun buy is still open, and now there is a tie between BEA and RedHat.

To be honest, I have been preparing some speeches to pronounce after the acquisition of that Linux company, but after what has happened with HR and the people leaving for Oracle, maybe it should be a good idea to digest BEA, so Larry would take his own medicine for once.
I'll be thinking about it. Keep on voting meanwhile and sending me comments.

I guess that those nice nurses sent by Steve, Iulia and Natasha, gave me too much of the dose of medicine... Peeeeace out! I looooove you Steeeveeee...

Sun Human Resources: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU WORKING FOR?

I'm furious, I'm really mad at HR. The headline indeed should say: HR, do you really work at Sun? What are you doing lately? Bok, our company is most of the time like an Ikea shopping experience: our employees have to do everything by themselves, from reserving a meeting room, to arrange a business travel, so HR is not an exception. Except the category of an employee and its salary, of course: but this is decided by the managers at last, this is not even a job for the boys and girls of HR. So, what I expected from them was to care about the employees, to help the company to retain the intellectual capital, or IC as we like to call it. Then, if this is what they are supposed to do, Why is there so many TECHNICALLY SKILLED people leaving the company?

In some GEMs, there are departments that are loosing up to 50% of the skilled people, counting Architects, Engineers and Business Development Managers, so there are some parts of the business with their continuity seriously harmed with this situation. In the SOA area, we have even lost 75% of the people selling JCAPS in one of the countries, and the situation is so well handled by HR that it is quite probably that we are going to loose the rest of the department.
What the HR head of that country told me is that "they are really focused in software". I pledged her to stop focusing and start doing her job before the whole office went out to work for our competitors (I really miss to have the control in this situations: Jonathan, I want to talk to you about this, please, pick up the phone, I've tried to call you 10 times this week... and it's only Monday!).

Ok, it is a matter of money. There are a lot of new jobs in other companies, the sector is going up almost like the times of the bubble, and experienced people is hard to find so other companies are willing to pay much more money for our skilled people. Don't you think there at HR that we have the same need of technically skilled people? Don't you ever realize that it is much more cheaper to rise the salaries and the benefits of the people _ALREADY_ working for us, with a lot of experience, rather than hiring new _unexperienced_ people that will need at least one year to match the people they are substituting? Not to mention that the people leaving is going to work for our competitors, knowing everything about on-going deals, customer contacts, product weakness...

Bye the way, I'm also mad at Steve and Larry. It seems that people leaving Sun software departments are going to Oracle (some to BEA, but I count on Larry buying them in the short term, so...), and the people that used to sell our iron is going to Micro$oft. I guess this makes sense, as Oracle is trying to build a quite serious speech in the middleware area, and Micro$oft is trying to make people believe that they can provide enterprise servers.

Well guys, Larry and Steve, I though we were partners, and that among partners we don't steel people... I'll ask the other Steve for the availability of Moshe to take some revenge...
By the way, it's curious, but it seems that Apple is not attracting many of our skilled people so far (despite the fact that this friggin device called the MacBook Pro is very easy to see in our offices).

After having fought with stakeholders so many years to avoid lay-offs, after having left the reigns to Jonathan with the promise to keep the most skilled people and to minimize the RIFs, now that the company is making money again, this is the way I get rewarded, by letting go (and now it is true that Sun is letting go people, not firing them) the people I have been taking care of during so many years?

I'm really FURIOUS. And you'll also be as soon as I post the stories that employees and ex-employees are sending me...

Jonathan, ok, don't answer the phone, but please, do something before it is too late: unfreeze the focal processes, rise the salaries, do something before I end up working as a pre-sales engineer as in the old times...

DELLizing Sun

Well, it seems that Jonathan and his team are trying to earn their living this week.
I was about to write an article about how we should improve our selling methods by "Dellizing" the company, but I think that Jonathan heard one of my interns commenting about that possible article -we'll talk later about information leaks, Ashok... maybe I should outsource the blog to the same country where FSJ has its own- because I just learned that WE have an agreement with Dell, so they'll sell our beloved and marvelous Solaris in their small irony machines.

Well, I think I have a "dejavou", Did you know where it was said that Dell rhymes with hell?

Namaste, Jonathan, good job, and keep on selling! (although it is not Sun's iron...).

Sun goes shopping (III)

I've just arrived to my office, thinking of a new post, when my interns inform me about the latest acquisition intent we are doing: Vaau, a company that seems to be in the line of the Identity Management Software area.
To be honest, I don't really get the point, as we have the best IdM solution in the world. I swear it, Gartner also says the same (you don't know how much did we have to pay to hear that from Gartner; what I'd love to know is how much did IBM and Oracle pay to be next to us having such a crapy products... Well, those are my interns opinions, of course, what would Ashok and his friends know about real business?).

Well, the thing is that everybody at the Software practice is excited with this, and they say this is what we need to keep us ahead in the IdM competition. I hope so, as long as this is good to sell our Niagara II.

By the way, I still keep my poll to know what company we should buy, apart from Vaau, of course. So far it seems that RedHat is winning our little competitions, but I still want to hear your opinions so I'll let Jonathan know what you think is best for Sun.

Pic taken from Vaau site (I hope a Sun site soon).

Congratulations: Sun posts 1Q profit!

Man, oh man, I'm so glad with this kind of news, and just a few days before our stockholder meeting! Maybe this way they'll just cheer us up and avoid the difficult questions...

Jonathan, I have to congratulate you, you are doing a great job turning things up (and I expect all the shareholders to congratulate me as I was the one who choose you for the job...).
I've heard you are inviting Ballmer to taste some good fine wine, so, you don't have to invite me, I'll hop by your house in half an hour, don't worry.

And of course, thank you very much to our workforce that is making possible this recovery (despite that our software is free, did I mention that?).

So, dear Sun fellows, keep doing what you are doing, I'm proud of you (not to mention my wife when she knew about the bonus I'm going to earn thanks to you!).

Did I mention it was free?

The other day I went back to Las Vegas for the NICSA Technology Summit 2007. Man, I guess I was invited there to give some kind of speech about Information Technologies, or something like that. The thing is that I made a mistake and used the speech I had prepared for the CEC event, only for Sun Engineers, a few weeks before... so, once I had said that software was free about three or four times, I couldn't step back, and I had to go on with this.
Anyhow, I heard that Jonathan is quite happy to see that I finally adopted Sun's policies, and it seems that this is one of the most important things we are embracing. No, it is not creating valuable IP, or expensive software or hardware, but giving the software for free.

By the way, did I mention it was free?

Well, so, now that I said it is free, I asked Jonathan to help me defending such an statement, so he gave me some hints apart from the fact that we indemnify and protect our users against any legal action that may be issued by the fact they are using our open source technology (I don't know why are we doing this without charging our customers for that; in the automobile industry this things doesn't happen...).

So, the main reasons are:

1. Lowering the barriers to entry (well, this is obvious... but I cannot see the benefit in here; RedHat is somehow free, and they don't make even half of the revenue we have with our proprietary stuff...).

2. Open drives interoperability, as a greater community of developers will adopt our stuff and make it easier for interoperability (well, apparently our friend Jobso didn't heard about that, as they are not using Java in their iPhraud neither their new Leopold!! Well, as Jobso says, namaste).

3. Open lowers the cost of R&D (yep, it is true... or well, it makes sense, as long as you have a community developing software for free that you can sell later... but the thing is, how you make those frigtards to develop new and cute products for you for free? The answer is that finally you have to pay most of the "community programmers", so they can finally build a real community, 'cause otherwise they end up doing their own applications and not the Sun applications we want to sell to the customers. Not to mention the hardware stuff, that we also made free: not many mentally sane people are going to make improvements _for_free_ in our T1 chips. And then there is the quality assurance, as you cannot provide support nor sell a code that you are not sure that doesn't contain any IP belonging to other company or violating any patent. And then you have to freeze the versions to provide appropriate support, as to provide real support for a open source code you need to hire an army of programmers and the become IBM Global Services... well, maybe it is not so easy to see the lowering in costs so easily.. ).

4. Open is secure. And although this is a counterintuitive statement, nobody can think of a Java virus so far (I don't know if this statement makes sense, but Jonathan told me to say that. Did I mention it was free?).

5. Open lowers the barriers to exit. Wait, wait, wait: I'm not supposed to say that to customers... Well, I can tell them the usual story of "we are using standards so you can choose technology from other providers", but we know we don't really mean it, do we?

Well, the people at the conference were so shocked that they didn't make many questions at last. But Jonathan, you have to help me because next week we have our annual stockholder meeting, and I'm afraid they'll ask just one silly question: Sun is not a services company, as IBM, to make profit from open source products. So, how are we going to make money by giving all our staff (not only the old-fashioned products everybody can download because there are hundreds of similar clones that do the same job -example: Web Server vs. Apache- also the new very valuable products nobody has so far) for free???

And then I'll have to respond to all our sales people in the software branch asking for their bonuses... and for their jobs...