Change of Season

Hmmm, you can smell it in the air... (no, not the Mac), but the change of the season is about to come this Saturday, and you all will be in summer. I say you all, as we at Sun already change our season, but not to Summer or even Spring again: we are in the Gossip Season!

Yeah, a thrilling period of time where everybody is frantic trying to fulfill the objectives to be allowed to stay on board, and where everybody starts making quizzes about what the new Fiscal Year will be, who will get fired, who'll come back to get the reigns of the company again after traveling all around the World, if we'll be sold, which company we'll buy...

You know, there is something in the air... and it'll be until next 1st of July.

HPC Computing in a Box

It seems that we are miniaturizing everything we have so far. Maybe it is that we are recalling what we did with the first 'pizza boxes', once upon a time in the late eighties, and we are just trying to repeat the same success.

Now it is the HPC in a box, we have been able to miniaturize most of the pieces involved in a HPC environment (even the price of it, the part I don't like to minimize...), keeping the power, so we have reached a wonderful 4th position at the top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. And with less cable use than our competitors (I guess this is also part of our green strategy...).

And no Steve, I'm sorry, we are not running Wirus Vista in our servers... but our offer to sell you our Solaris kernel for Windows 7 is still valid (plus a 20%, of course).

Ahhmmm, I just love iron.

Search for Differences

I am proposing a simple quiz: search for differences between this picture:


and this other picture:



I'll help you: basically they are the same, but in the first picture IBM used a much uglier paint and used huge logos to hide the Sun logo. Oh, and most important at all, the IBM container comes "complete with IBM services", as they say in their video: it is, next to the data center container, they'll install a full city of containers with prefab houses for the zillions of consultants they are going to "install" too in your company (and that will drain your budget).

But not only our paintwork is much better, our box has been tested against 6.7 earthquakes! Top this.

Already tested our SunRays? IBM did, and they liked it very much...

Garbage Trucks Colliding (AGAIN!!!)

I know, I didn't say anything about the HP-EDS eatin... I mean, merge, or buying, or whatever, but I can't stand it anymore...
So, instead of repeating myself I just recall what I already commented about the HP-Compaq merger a while ago... No need to remember my words, should I?, many people does, and even use them for other subjects too.
Bad news for us is that EDS is a huge Sun customer nowadays, so we have decided to be very careful with what we sell them from now on. Well, we'll see if Don does his job -the secret one I committed him- and HP becomes also a Sun customer and distributes Solaris (they are the only ones in industry that do not yet), as they are a little bit aggressive against us (and they shouldn't as their real business are PCs, Laptops, printers and over all things the ink for the printers -much better if is color ink-).
Well, I don't know if this is a good move, as EDS will never be seen again as a independent integrator for customers and HP becomes a mogul in the business. We rather keep our flexibility being the little big one in the business.

Visiting Europe (III)

I just received this cute photo from my last visit to Spain, si I couldn't resist uploading it in the blog.

Ain't I a cute guy? I don't remember who is the other guy, some politician I guess, but I look terrific!
Asok, a memo to Rebecca, from my office: Update my travel information, the Google map and so on, it is quite outdated...
Well, it is time to get back to work. And it is wonderful, I just came back to the office, and the shares rose up more than 2%! Investors just love me...

Holidays in Spain (II)

This Monday I arrived to Spain, and the first I did was asking Asok if we really were in the sunny Spain as what I saw through the window was this:
I was tempted to call Rebecca, from my office, to terminate Asok contract for this tremendous mistake, when the pilot confirmed we had arrived to Madrid indeed, and that there has been raining like never before during the past weeks.

Later on, after leaving my private jet (I always travel in my private jet, it is much more uncomfortable than regular liners, but I just do it for the sake of the business, you know), then only thing we could see at the road were trucks, hundreds of them, so a 15 minutes trip to the city took us about 2 hours...

As I was told later in the meeting I held with the Industry Minister, it seems that there is a truckers strike in Spain, so they decided to cut the roads. So simple.

Well, what I didn't see all the way was a single policeman, I guess they were pretty busy somewhere else.

The meeting with the Ministers were pretty interesting, although I think they didn't understand yet what are our SunRays for... Well, I hope that the local team at Spain will have the chance to explain that to them in detail. I have to say that I didn't have the chance to meet the Prime Minister in person (nobody could tell if he was busy or just surrounded by trucks in the Parliament), but everybody says he is a very very clever person (for those who don't know him, I enclose one of his most famous pictures).

No, he is not Mr. Bean, I checked that already. This is the real Prime Minister of Spain (what I can't tell is if this is the real photo or he was somehow favored with PhotoShop). I also heard some comments about that this man is a real jinx, but

Apart from the political side of the visit, I also met with the most important CEOs of the country, although someone might have made a mistake with the dossiers distributed before my visit, as they all asked about the 3G iPhone. I think they were somehow disappointed when I showed them my Sun badge, with JavaCard integrated, and told them that this was my computer and then showed the Sun Ray, but I'm sure it will take me less time to convince them to migrate to SunRays than the time I needed to do so with my wife (I'm about to make her abandon that crappy Mac!!!).

Of course I got time to do many other things in my visit, but it would make a quite boring entry in my blog. By the way, I followed my friend Steve's advice, and I won't be traveling to Hungary this time... (Steve, you are my real -fake- friend, be sure of that. The other Steve is my fake -fake- friend, but as they are our laptop provider, I have to be nice to him, otherwise I lose the rebates when buying more than 50 MacBooks...).

Out of the office: holidays in Spain

Well, I won't be on real vacation, at least this is what I said in the office, as I will be meeting with some ministers of the Spanish government, so it is just work after all...

Don't think that I'm one of those illiterate that think that Spain is just south of the border with Mexico and that you can travel there by bus, I know it is in the old Europe (been there a few times before!), although I'm not sure if it is between Greece or Italy or south the UK (thanks, Ashok just showed me Google Maps and I can see it is south France).
Well, I'll have the chance to follow my friend (fake) Steve's advice and go to visit El Bulli after meeting with the ministers, and some Museums in Madrid. I'm visiting the new formed government and as I want to leave a permanent impression I'm giving them a fully new -pre-sales guys swear they had only been used in 345 presentations previously- and personalized SunRays (just as the one in the photo).



As you can see, it has surface enough to add much more drawings than those already painted in the personalized Zunes that both (fake)Steves are showing in their pages.

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...