Counting every penny

You'll have noticed that Jonathan (the real and the fake) and me are not writing very much lately in our respective blogspaces. The reason is that tomorrow we are publishing the results for our '08 Fiscal Year, and so we are in the process of counting accurately every dollar to provide an accurate image of our company.
Oh, I forgot to tell Lehman to check the sandwich machine in the Santa Clara cafeteria... I'll do it myself (every penny counts.. ;-) ).

Stay tunned, we'll publish our results tomorrow.

Microsoft: another happy customer

Believe it or not, Microsoft seems to be another happy Sun customer!
We cannot say it very loud, as it is a secret, you know, some of our customers don't want to talk about how they are building their infrastructures, but Microsoft is buying our Datacenter in a Box (aka BlackBox) to build some of their new data centers.

Thanks a lot dear Steve. Now I see a bright future to our friendship. You can even run Vista in my boxes if that pleases you (our offer to use the Solaris kernel in the next version of Vista Server stands).

I know some people don't really think this is a good idea, as they feel that the Earth is plenty of space to store an infinite amount of servers wherever we want, but, following that reasoning, there should also not be any problem in finding space for housing, and we all know how much is worthwhile a house in Tribeka or in Georgetown, for instance.


Follow my advice: put a Blacbox in your life (nice iron, and we have it in every color you want, as long as it is black... ;-) I'm joking, for a little extra we can paint it in white too). Oh, and we can add your branding in the walls, where it currently says Sun too just for a few extra bucks.

Town hall meetings

I remember that town hall meeting before the first round of reduction in forces we had to face back in 2002. I had several thousands of our employees in a hotel in Broomfield and I opened the QA so anybody could freely ask whatever they wanted. The layoffs hadn't been announced but the rumor was already quite strong, so the first guy who asked for the micro stood up and make his question: "It is said that there is going to be a RIF in the company, what can you say about that?" I looked at the guy and answered: "Do you volunteer?"

The whole auditorium froze and nobody else dared making any question related to such a matter that I particularly don't like (I left my position as CEO because I didn't want to fire anybody. I don't even like that euphemysm of calling a layoff a Reduction In Forces). The truth is that this guy was an actor I hired the day before so everybody had a clear picture of what was going to happen and I didn't have to answer innapropriate questions...
Why I'm telling you this story? Well, now I'm not the CEO and so I can answer more freely any question, so I'm opening a virtual Town Hall Meeting: you can send me your questions (reach me by any mean you find most suitable: phone, mail, meet me at the office...), and I'll post here your questions and my answers.

I'm not on holidays...

I know that I've been away from this blog for a while, but it is not because I'm on vacation nor anything like that. I've been doing just hard work setting... er, making..., you know, doing some calculations about our results of the fiscal year, and I'm afraid that this, together with the announcement of the date where we are going to release our results for the year, has led to some misunderstanding from the market. They thought we were broken, and so the shares plunged more than the rest of the NASDAQ (the gas price and the subprime crisis is helping a bit too, you know).
So, I had a little talk to Lehman (I'm working closely with him lately to propose some measures to help boosting our revenue up), and we decided to give some results in advance so our stakeholders could have at least a couple of days of relief untill we deliver the real data.
And yes, we are a profitable company again. Well, or so it seems from the mail Mike sent, as he gave me the raw data I'd rather read the summary in the press (but only those articles that say nice things about us, of course).

Stay tuned, there are many more interesting things to come.