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.

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?

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 ?

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.

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.

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).

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?

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.

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

"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

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