back to article Sun's war against clarity and business continues

The problem with the Particpation Age, as Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz describes the current state of internet affairs, is that everyone thinks it a good idea to participate. We were beyond skeptical when Schwartz fired up a blog and started banging on about the Participation Age. CEOs have a horrible fondness for hearing their …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Nick Kew
    Alert

    The price of free speech.

    Interesting problem for Sun, given how big they are on giving employees freedom over what they blog about. If management have Words with this blogger, they risk unkind fingers pointing at their stated policy and values.

    A company with a conventional "everything must be approved by PR" policy doesn't have that problem.

  2. Dr Stephen Jones

    "I say “important” in quotes as its all relative "

    Relative to... what? This babbling idiot doesn't know what's going through his own mind.

    OK, so he's trying to tell us that datacenters don't matter. Except when they might. Maybe. Sometimes.

    Is this Tim Bray in disguise?

  3. Never Will YouKNow
    Thumb Down

    Ozzie

    Must be a slow news day.. You really hammer Brian for what is a fairly innocuous comment. Basically saying that Sun is moving much of its infrastructure from infrastructure which is deployed in a dedicated fashion to some shared infrastructure. And "whaddayaknow", Sun just happens to own and deploy a facility for running shared infrastructure called Network.COM. So whats the issue ?

  4. Erik Ray

    sun = the anti-apple?

    compare and contrast with apple's attitude toward social networking. are there any apple employees freely speaking their minds? do you think this helps or hinders their business plan? essay question is worth 100 points.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Whats the point!!

    Ashley,

    What point are you trying to make;

    1. some bloggers writing style does not show the discipline of a journalist ? Are you talking the quantitative issues of grammar and spelling or the qualitative of bias and interpretation. Glass houses on the latter for any good journalist. A journalist lives and dies by aligning themselves with a readerships bias. On the former, well, consumer beware. If you choose to read, then so be it.

    2. Or maybe you are questioning the strategy ? Seems pretty consistent with Sun's vision of "Network is the Computer". Moving away from dedicated infrastructure for there enterprise and onto a more shared infrastructure. Just happen Sun owns a shared infrastructure provider in "Network.COM"

    What is the point you are trying to make ? Or is it just be be controversial to get more hits to your site.

  6. b shubin
    Boffin

    Signal to noise ratio

    it should not be a surprise that so many blogs are crap, and only add to the noise in the equation. most people's thoughts are not worth writing down, and even when such material is worth putting into print, most people suck at writing, as they suck at communicating coherently by any method.

    try to imagine GW Bush's blog, sans speechwriters and handlers. go on. i'll wait for you to stop laughing...

    the reason why good blogs are highly regarded (and very uncommon), is the same reason good authors are widely read (and likewise rare). those who thoughtfully consider what they wish to communicate, and then express it effectively and engagingly, are just as uncommon online as they are in literature.

    mostly, the blogosphere is nothing more than mental masturbation: some twit unspeakably aroused by his or her own astuteness, bothering a keyboard and taking up bandwidth. such a waste. the world would be better served if all the blogging twits would just get out more (or at least strive to be more thoughtful, knowledgeable, articulate, and most importantly, relevant).

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @b shubin

    Agree with that comment. The problem with Baker and Cinque is that they are talking (typing) straight off the top of their heads, like 99.9% of bloggers. Just like so much of 'rolling news', there is no careful consideration of the issue(s) and certainly no context.

    PS. It should be mandatory for all these guys to have a copy of 'Fowler's Common English Usage' handy - and an equivalent of Professor Snape around to beat them about the head with same when they make dumb grammatical errors.

    Now where's that grumpy old man icon?

  8. Nick Palmer
    Alien

    @What's the point!!

    Ashlee's point is not merely about some minor points of grammar; he's pointing out the difference between a blog that is an excellent example of communication and that is substantively communicative, containing REAL STUFF THAT PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW, as opposed to a couple of examples of typographic diarrhoea that are disastrously opaque, and appear to contain nothing except hyperbole. Baker's stuff needs no comment; Cinque's? If he had said something like "We're selling utility computing and shared infrastructure, and from 2013, because we believe in this approach, we're going to be undertaking a root and branch shift of our own infrastructure to a shared/utility model; we're thinking of migrating this department, then that one..." or something similar, THAT would be communication - it wouldn't need to contain detailed information, but would be a clear indication of where they were going. Instead, we've just got a load of waffle, that really ought to be followed by an explanation of how they won't even NEED datacentres when they become operant Thetans or whatever... Plus everything b shubin said above.

  9. Robert Ramsay

    Cinque = amanfrommars

    only Sun's spell check has filtered out all the spurious capital letters.

  10. amanfromMars Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Big Blues Brothers in Alms? :-) ......[42EduTain Entertainment Holywood Palace Barracks Style]*

    "Cinque = amanfrommars "

    Now that would be AI Special Relationship 42 Beta Driver the Virtualised Management of Global Perception and wholly Consistent and Complementary in the Cloud Network of Computers and Network Internetworking Robot ICQs ........ SMARTer Enabled QuMan Beings ........CyberIntelAIgents.

    You'd need 42 ask Brian Cinque though whether Sun could handle IT..... which, of course, they could if they would.

    And QuITe where that would leave their Contemporaries, apart from in the Doldrums of Sub Prime Operating Systems, would be for them to consider.

    * An Optional Extra for Deadhead Blighty Input Output Systems

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    More signs that Sun wants out of the hardware business

    I haven't figured out Mr. Schwartz's logic yet but Sun seems to want no part of the hardware business. Evidence?

    1. Change Stock ticker from SUN to JAVA

    2. License Solaris to IBM and Dell

    3. Purchase MySQL

    4. Sell off their own data centers

  12. Ashlee Vance (Written by Reg staff)

    Re: Ozzie

    That's an innocuous post? I'd have thought a $18bn company changing its entire business model rather noccuous.

    The point is that Brian doesn't say Sun will move the shared network.com service it offers today. In fact, he says, in as far as he says anything, rather the opposite - that Sun will have no systems left to offer such a service. He never explains where internal Sun IT ends and outward facing Sun begins with this plan.

    Since he's talking about his company's entire business changing, you'd think one or two details might help. Awful lot of coverage on his first post for it to be called innocuous.

    AV

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like