The Three Questions

[Published on 10/Oct/2007 at 12:50 A.M. local time]

Came the hour, came the man; with an enigmatic smile, walking briskly across the stage, commenting on the T shirt that the CEC host had worn, he addressed all of us on the second day of the Customer Engineering Conference 2007. Many would have read his thought provoking blogs, but many wouldn’t get a chance to see him speak in stage. As expected, his speech had some elements on the vision of Sun, some elements on the its direction, some elements of motivation and more importantly some elements of humour. No wonder he bears the highest office in Sun.

Johnathan Schwartz’s speech revolved around three questions, three questions that he answered himself. The three questions that he put forward to us pops up from the fact that Sun spends a few billion dollars on Research and Development and the obvious questions that Johnathan displayed on his slide were:

* In What (are we investing)?
* For whom?
* How?

What was more attention grabbing was his answer to the second question, wherein he put a slide on the screen with a photograph of Richard Stallman on the left hand side and the logos of some corporate customers on the right hand side. He then asked us all if we paid for Intellectual properties while at College, and none of us had a positive answer there. He then went on to throw more clarity on the two distinct markets that Sun is serving viz community(who will not pay for the softwares) and corporate customers (who is more than willing to pay for the softwares, for the downtime of their business dwarfs the services fee charged) and the role that each of them would play in having a positive impact on Sun’s growth. Jonathan then showed us his favourite photo, more favourite than his family photo and told us he could spot a Solaris user in Antartica(!) without having a Sales force there. That’s precisely what a community involvment can do to a software. Johnathan was also interested in showing us the pink dots for the other softwares as well.

Johnathan answered a few questions that showed up on the web page as well as a couple of them asked by the audience. Needless to mention, it was a great session.

Earlier today, Dave Douglas, Vice President, Eco Responsibility made his entry into the stage and spoke at length on the measures that we are taking at Sun to ensure that we don’t spoil the planet that we are in. He, being the VP of Eco Responsibility could show us slides like this, ensuring that none of us sent a feedback about his presentation(a fear that he admitted)By the way, please click right here to read Sun’s 2007 CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) Report.

Among several things that Dave discussed, he emphasized a lot on “eco friendly” features of Sun’s Open Work Practice such as keeping a lot of people out of the road by encouraging them to work from their homes (Ask me, I love the idea of working from home). Sun’s products, as you would know, are also increasingly becoming environmental friendly.

Well, do you know that there is an open source tool help participants assess, track, and compare business energy performance, share proven best practices to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and encourage sustainable innovation. Well, I didn’t know until Dave shared it with us this morning. If you want to know about it, go for it and save our Earth.

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