Scobleizer - Latest Comments in What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

Vic Berggren — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 16:18:11 -0000

You have 2 minutes. Convince me to switch from Microsoft.Net to a Sun solution.

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

Brian Magierski — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 17:56:46 -0000

Hi Robert. Great idea. I'd like ask the following:

1. What have been the top three benefits for him / Sun of running his blog?

2. What would he like to accomplish in engaging his customers that the blog or other existing tools (such as forums) have not allowed him to do?

-- brian

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

Gerald Buckley — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 16:50:56 -0000

In light of the Perkins shakeup at HP... Might ask him how relations are amongst the board at Sun (specifically, Doerr). I'm sure it's confidential... But, you don't get what you don't ask for.

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

MattW — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 16:44:28 -0000

Instead of releasing Solaris as an also-ran Open Source OS, why not become the premier Linux Enterprise provider? You could have approved, tested hardware configurations and support offerings, add some proprietary tools, and use those extra dev hours in OSS projects that help everyone, rather than struggling to help Solaris keep up with the Joneses.

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

Frank Bisono — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 16:30:50 -0000

Robert,

Please ask him "What was SUN thinking when they bought Cobalt Networks and then promptly killed the most popular line of appliance servers in the web hosting industry? They had a chance to take a great product and improve it not to mention dominate the hosting market, but instead dropped the ball and lost huge market share to Dell." Tragic $2 Billion dollar mistake in my book.

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

Steve Garfield — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 15:36:49 -0000

From Carol:

"What are you doing to gain back market share from AIX?"

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

skwp — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 15:14:35 -0000

Why is java so verbose? The for loop syntax introduced in 1.5 is but a fractional step in the right direction, made ten years too late. Assume IDEs that save you from typing the syntax are not an answer in the same way that a crutch is not an answer for a man with a broken foot. I want my code more readable! It should be about _what_ i'm doing (in my domain), not _how_. Thanks :)

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

Christopher Coulter — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 13:09:02 -0000

Did John Doerr leave the board on account of pretexting? :)

Intel is doing 10,000, you going to match them? It's the trendy in thing you know. Least another 5,000...

So charity work after Sun Micro's certain demise? Maybe you can join the Gates Foundation, and buy up Newspaper Empires, under the guise of charity.

Golden parachute all in order?

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

-gary — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 12:46:18 -0000

The really good questions will never be answered or, most likely, never even allowed to be asked.

Number one would be why doesn't Sun quit trying to swim up and ever increasingly huge stream and sell now to return some sort of value to their shareholders?

Why does almost every company seem to feel it's their feduciary duty to run their companies into the ground despite years of forewarning that it's going to happen and then leave shareholders with nothing?

Why does Schwartz not realize that Sun is about as relevant in today's computing world as pets.com and the sock pupet are to today's web?

Those are more slanted opinions than questions, but even the real questions behind them will never be answered.

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

sandra — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 11:02:31 -0000

What does Mr. Schwartz think about Java Rich Internet Application (RIA) approaches such as Canoo's UltraLightClient that offers a 100% Java/Swing
alternative to AJAX?

What will Sun do to strengthen Java on the desktop?

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

joeduck — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 10:36:53 -0000

1. What does he see as "the middle game / endgame" for MS Office vs Open Office? Is OpenOffice going to grow in scope or was this just an experiment. Will the Office Suite battles kill MS?

2. How long will Google dominate Search? Online Revenues? Why?

Joe Hunkins
Talent, Oregon
http://joeduck.wordpress.com

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

Sean Ammirati — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 10:35:00 -0000

There has been a lot of talk about the evolution of business development to a BD 2.0 (http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2... http://profitablesignals.co...

Interestingly, you talked about before the meme was even popular on your blog long when writing "The Death of the Cold Call" http://blogs.sun.com/jonath...

While this is a very interesting perspective with how Sun "approaches" developing customers, I would be very interested in how you would recommend organizations "approach" Sun about partnering?

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

Mihir Gandhi — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 08:37:06 -0000

Does he think that JDE can compete against .net?

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

Brent Castle — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 08:22:28 -0000

Have you seen growth in the Sun Grid Compute Utility? While I find this to be a remarkable resource I haven't seen much (any?) marketing. Is this the future of high speed computation? Will people outsource intense computation much like they are outsourcing storage?

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

Carolus.Holman — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 07:44:24 -0000

When are they going to release something that consumers identify with? I think this is Windows main strength. Imagine if Windows were only at work, no one would know or care about it. Same goes for Sun.

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

Simon Brocklehurst — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 05:17:38 -0000

Sun now has some really great entry-level servers - perhaps the best in the industry. However, it doesn't have any entry-level storage offerings to go with these servers. That's a problem for customers, because it means it's impossible to buy a complete entry-level "server + storage solution" from Sun (which you can easily do from Dell)

My question is: is Sun planning to address this gap in its entry-level storage offerings?

Sun re-wrote the storage rule-book with their new Thumper product - Enterprise storage for $2 per GB. If they introduced, say, a 2TB storage product for $2 per GB, customers would be beating down their doors.

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

booger — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 04:08:50 -0000

Totally agree with comment #25 re: "Why is Sun so confused about their strategy?".

As i read your post (before reading that comment), I was forming the exact same question...not that Sun PR isn't scouring every line of these comments but if you get your facts in line beforehand, that would be a pretty hardhitting question.

Booger

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

Shiraz Kanga — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 04:06:12 -0000

Thanks Robert. Here is my question.

BlogEverywhere runs Fedora Linux on Dell hardware. The backend is a Java based server (Tomcat) with a MySQL DB. How would Jonathan convince me to move to Sun hardware and/or Solaris OS?

Our service is very new (and very beta!) so this is probably the best time for a switch - i.e. it's now or never.

Shiraz Kanga
Founder & CTO
BlogEverywhere.com
http://www.blogeverywhere.com

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

shannonclark — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 03:56:03 -0000

In the late 90's I worked for a mid-sized Sun Reseller, was even certified to support Sun's servers up to nearly their E10k machines (great training back then btw).

In the early 2000's I, along with many many other startups (and large firms) didn't buy any Sun Servers, instead chose to use an assortment of servers running linux.

Now, in the mid-2000's Sun makes some great servers (and even reasonably affordable) but what are the compelling reasons for me, as an entrepeneur or as a consultant, to choose a Sun Server over a grid of standard servers.

More critically, how will Sun as a business survive as storage, memory and CPU costs all continue to come down into the foreseeable future? And especially as more and more systems are designed not for "big iron" single servers but for large grids (i.e. think Google's server farms). The only reasonable way to build "internet scale" systems these days is to plan on building them on a grid model from the beginning - i.e. any single server, however great, may crack under the strain of being on top of Digg, being Slashdoted, BoingBoinged or TechCrunched.

In the face of those trends, what is Sun's message?

And where (and do?) Sun's reseller partners and others such as individual consultants fit into the picture?

Shannon

(Shannon Clark, MeshForum - http://www.meshforum.org)

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

Nico Lumma — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 03:20:16 -0000

Please ask him why it is such a hassle to install an up-to-date version of Apache and PHP on those spiffy new servers they sell? They'd sell more if they weren't so focused on Java all the time.

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

▓▒SEARCH ENGINES WEB▒▓ — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 02:40:13 -0000

The origin of the concept for WEB SERVICES (J2EE)

The complete concept from conception to completion for the idea and implementation of Web Services

Also...

The pros and cons of each of the major SOAs

Also...

What happened to the idea for a JAVA Browser

Also...

Will SUN develop a Search Engine or Search Technology

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

John — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 01:45:11 -0000

Ask Jonathan if McNealy should have stepped down sooner? If McNealy had, Ed Zander may have been CEO of Sun instead of CEO of Motorola. Does Jonathan keep in touch with Zander? When is Sun coming out with a VIZR ;-)

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

topgold — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 01:28:48 -0000

I'd like to know when Jonathan gets time to blog. Does he set aside time to blog or annotate things he wants to write about? Or is he a free-form blogger and blogging just happens?

In Ireland, most CEOs won't blog because of competing time pressures or insecurity about the results. Seeing Sun's top gun with a blog challenges some of those hesitations.

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

manishbansal — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 00:44:25 -0000

Why is Sun so confused about their strategy? Sometime they talk about giving away their hardwar to sell services and sometimes they talk about giving away their software to sell hardware.

Re: What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

Venky Krishnamoorthy — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 00:01:05 -0000

Ask him about the SUN stock price. When will it start going north?