Scooter and the shell shock sham

"Combat stress reaction, in the past commonly known as shell shock or battle fatigue, is a military term used to categorize a range of behaviours resulting from the stress of battle which decrease the combatant's fighting efficiency. The most common symptoms are fatigue, slower reaction times, indecision, disconnection from one's surroundings, and inability to prioritize."

Subject: Thanks for a great 28 years
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010
From: Scott McNealy
To: [all Sun employees]

Gang,

When I interviewed many of you for employment at Sun over the years, one commitment often made was that things will change above, below, and around you faster than any place you have ever been. Looks like this was one area we exceeded plan for 28 years. While it was never the primary vision to be acquired by Oracle, it was always an interesting option. And this huge event is upon us now. Let's all embrace it with all of the enthusiasm and class and talent that we have to offer.

This combination has the potential to put Sun, its people, and its technology at the center of yet another industry and game-changing inflection point. The opportunity is well-documented and articulated by Larry and the Oracle folks. Not much I can add on this score. This is a very powerful merger. And way better than some of the alternatives we were facing.

So what do I say to all of you, now this is happening?

It turns out that one simple message to the large and diverse Sun community is actually quite hard to craft. Even for a big mouth who is always ready with a clever quip. The community includes our resellers and customers, our current and former employees, their friends and families who supported our employees on their mission to change the industry, our investors, our supply and service partners, students and educators, and even our competitors with whom we often collaborated.

But let me try. Though nothing I could write comes close to matching the unbelievably strong and positive emotions I have for you all. See, I never was able to master dispassion. I truly loved starting, running, and living Sun. And the last four years have not been without serious withdrawal. And the EU approval rocked me more than it should have.

So, to be honest, this is not a note this founder wants to write. Sun, in my mind, should have been the great and surviving consolidator. But I love the market economy and capitalism more than I love my company.

And I sure "hope" America regains its love affair with capitalism. And except for the auto industry, financial industry, health care, and some other places (I digress), the invisible hand is doing its thing quite efficiently. So I am more than willing to accept this outcome.

And my hat is off to one of the greatest capitalists I have ever met, Larry Ellison. He will do well with the assets that Sun brings to Oracle.

What we did right and wrong at Sun over the years might make for interesting reading. However, I am not a book writer. I am a husband, father of four, and a builder and leader of people who want to make a difference.

But spare me a bit of nostalgia. Not of the mistakes we made, and lord knows I made a ton. But of the things we did right and well.

First and foremost, Sun innovated like crazy. We took it to the limit (see Eagles). And though we did not monetize our inventions as well as we could have, few companies have the track record in R&D that we had over the last 28 years. This made working at Sun really cool. Thanks to all of you inventors and risk takers who changed how we live.

Sun cared about its customers. Even more than we cared about our own company at times. We looked at our customer's mission as more important than ours. Maybe we should have asked for more revenue in return, but our employees were always ready to help first. I love this about Sun, which I guess makes me a good capitalist, if not a great capitalist.

Sun did not cheat, lie, or break the rule of law or decency. While we enjoyed breaking the rules of conventional wisdom and archaic business practice, and for sure loved to win in the market, we did so with a solid reputation for integrity. Nearly three decades of competing without a notable incident of our folks going off course morally or legally. Not all executives and big companies are bad. Really. There are good companies out there. Special thanks to all of my employees for this. I never had to hide the newspaper in shame from my children.

Sun was a financial success. We paid billions in taxes, salaries, purchases, leases, training, and even lawyers and accountants for devastatingly cumbersome SOX and legal compliance (oops, more classic digression). Long-term and smart investors made billions in SUNW. And our customers generated revenue and savings using our equipment in countless ways. Many employees started families, bought homes, and put them through school while working at Sun. Our revenues over 28 years exceeded $200B. Few companies make it to the F200. We did. Nice.

Sun employees had way more fun than any other company. By far. From our dress code ("You must!") to beer busts to our April Fools' pranks to SunRise to our quiet enjoyment at night of a long, hard, well-done day of work, no company enjoyed "work" more than Sun. Thanks to all of our employees past and present for making Sun such a blast.

I could go on for a long time reminiscing about the good and great stuff we did at Sun, but just allow me one last one. We shared. Not the greatest attribute for a capitalist. But one I could not change and was not willing to change about Sun while I was in charge. We shared in the success of Sun with our resellers. With our employees through stock options, SunShare, beer busts, and the like (for as long as Congress would allow) and through our efforts to keep as many of them on board for as long as possible during the inevitable down cycles. With our partners through the Java Community Process, through our open-source collaborations, and licensing strategies. With our customers through our commitments to low barriers to exit. Sun was never just about us. It was about we. And that may be a bit of the reason we are where we are today.

But I have few regrets (see Sinatra's "My Way") and will always look back at Sun and its gang with only pride. Enormous pride. You are the best this industry ever had, though few outside of Sun recognized it.

And what we are about will live on in Sparc, Solaris, Java, our products, and our spirit. Well past everyone's recollections of what we did together. I will never forget, though.

Oracle is getting a crown jewel of the technology industry. They will do great things with Sun. Do your best to support them, and keep the Sun spirit alive and well in the industry. Our children will be better for it.

Thanks for the off-the-charts support to everyone who ever carried a Sun badge, used our products, or helped our company through the years.

And thanks to my wonderful wife, Susan, who gave this desperado (see Eagles) a chance to choose the Queen of Hearts before it was too late.

Someday, hopefully, you will all get to see or meet her and my other life's works named Maverick, Dakota, Colt, and Scout. If you do, perhaps you will understand why I stepped back from the CEO role four years ago. And why I feel like the luckiest guy in the whole world.

My best to all of you, and remember:

Kick butt and have fun!

Scott

The Betrayal of Tradition

Essays on the Spiritual Crisis of Modernity

homo homini loopy

Most people are other people.
Their thoughts are someone elses opinions,
their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
~ Oscar Wilde

They copied all they could follow
but they couldn't copy my mind
so I left them sweating and stealing
a year and a half behind.
~ Rudyard Kipling

Fluxology Alliance - appendix

Fluxology Alliance

View more documents from Paul Peters.

Fluxology Alliance

Sun founder Bill Joy is attributed to have said "most of the smart people work at some other company." When Sun Microsystems was founded, it was thoroughly understood Sun would live or die with it's partner network and as such set on to become a very partner-centric company.
By any standard, and even more so the American as we know it from afar, such a non-hierarchical, open and collaborative approach is unique. Sun Microsystems was open before Open Source became a popular concept.
Come and go the dot-com bubble , Sun is still very much about openness, however painful that may be with everyone else being an expert on economics and technology after reading some blogs and buying some stock options..

Given a choice, if you're a bit of a geek, a freak or just a workaholic, how would you make your work more interesting? You try to work on something challenging with really smart people.. Such people aren't only rare, but they are usually caught up in something else, they are individuals with their own plans, and often a high sense of freedom and drive to accomplish something. Now.. how to work together. Well, one way is to have a company such as Applied Minds, but still then you're trying to hire people who are hardcore individualists. Might work in the US due it's different labour ethos, but unmanageable in Europe..
A consortium of some sorts should do, a way to facilitate working with smart folk while acknowledging their individuality and personal agenda. A global non-equity strategic alliance, an open joint venture, proved the appropriate format.

So, that's that. During nearly two years of contacted people and companies with certain characteristics, experience, expertise, hard and soft skills, we now have launched a partner network around Sun's software stack.
Starting around the SOA/BI offerings, and extending into Identity Management and beyond, we're also getting involved with the Cloud offerings as far as Sun's offerings goes. Adding even more value we have streamlined and prepared certain specific technology partnerships, so to stretch current technological means beyond the average and pave a pathway into the future towards "the adjacent possible" in both business relations and information technology

Currently referred to under the nomer of "Fluxology Alliance" for the sake of simplicity, once reaching the critical mass of required momentum, proven cohesion, and adequate harvest of the intrinsic quality levels, every participant is free to represent the network and spread the cooperation further in the areas of joint delivery, sales, training and solution development.

Along with the partner networks, "unit 42" and "n-simplex alliance", Fluxology offers open-ended and packaged services, training, solutions, frameworks and technologies to take OpenESB to the next level. Our global partner network of senior experts currently involves some 135 senior experts ranging from 1 to 16 years of experience with the Sun/SeeBeyond toolsets, projects, architectural styles and management approach.
Our extended network, as well as a recently started "partner-of-a-partner" modality can leverage unequaled value in any direction.

We're very happy to announce the launch of this partner network.
These go to eleven...

Beware of fire. Learn from water.

Was reading some interesting articles on the history of Russian martial arts, in particular Systema, and it's roots in the orthodox Christian monasteries. Systema, surviving the communist era by being adapted by the Spetsnaz, as well as being practiced outside of Russia, is an extremely effective fluid combat style. Hitting and kicking methods are backed up with deep bio-mechanical knowledge as well as using acupressure points which will disrupt an opponent's conscious control of his/her body.
Now, in the more 'internal' martial arts movements, techniques, stages of development, mentality, are often associated with different elements. Bujinkan techniques are roughly ordered according to earth, water, fire, wind and sky/emptiness, the Godai, leaving out the sixth element of consciousness which is more the realm of esoteric buddhism. Arnaud Cousergue, a fantastic French teacher of Bujinkan arts, has translated these in the more understandable concepts of absorb, block, counter, deflect and evade, which roughly equates with sky, earth, fire, water and wind. Although of course any of these concepts can be associated with any of the elements depending on context, as so many of these systems are slightly fractal in nature. Great simplification of possible strategies though.
Systema is primarily water and wind style, water being associated with the physical movements, and wind with the spirit.

A funny thing popped into my mind while reading about the monasteries. Dating back to the Byzantine empire as well as a favored (tax free) position during Mongol rule, during the centuries most towns across the Sovjet union developed alongside rivers and were constructed with a common place, the monastery, at it's center, or a monastery was established and gradually a town developed around it. Being part of trade and traveling routes many facilities such as protection were arranged from these monasteries. Also, knights returning from battle and other soul-searchers would often spend several years or the remainder of their life, so as far as protection goes there was room for much cross fertilization, leading to e.g. fighting monks, as in the above context.
Quite a contrast with modern-day "shareholder value" i thought.. shaking off a mild grudge towards much of the bluff-infested money grabbing business mentality so often encountered these days, and i recalled an article from Master Nan Huai-Chin about modern-day and future business and his lovely goal-oriented taoism. Yet, it's an integral vision he has on businesses, both social, cultural and economical. Something like Green IT or the "house of the future" initiatives, but much more all embracing.
It reminded me of the advice of the world's oldest business, a 1400 year old construction company in Japan, when it bankrupted in 2006 and was transferred into the Takamatsu Corporation. "Beware of fire. Learn from water" was their advice after 14 centuries and some 40 generations..

The long term view on SOA as advocated by Ann Thomas Manes of Burton Group, a fairly complete, embracing, corporate culture altering approach on IT projects, what does a business want with their systems on the long run ? They want flow. They don't want a bunch of ivory towers or a mega-mainframe containing all the business rules, but which makes it impossible to react quickly. Flow, smart use of wind and water, Feng Shui, "the ancient Chinese practice of placement and arrangement of space to achieve harmony with the environment" as it's eloquently described a well known open-opinion encyclopedia.
Good SOA is about company flow, about natural movement of information and functionality, to create the ability to deflect, evade and absorb. And to avoid blocking and counters, which is so often the result of short-term agendas or the pervading hierarchical military style of organization early Western companies were based upon.
Beware of fire. Learn from water. Don't buy SOA. Do SOA.

Service Oriented Argus

SOA is one of those terms i am hesitant about using. The main reason being because it is such an obvious technical style to use for certain integration initiatives. And it's so easy to fail in matters of style, especially when it is being over hyped by software vendors to an stunning degree. SOA is a strategic discipline in the area of Enterprise Architecture to gradually transform the application landscape in such a way they can be used as simple building blocks for purposes of interoperability and assembly. Being such a discipline it requires a well-balanced approach of vision, business analysis, audience, methodology and management. Just like large scale integration projects require.

Now, besides the reluctance of stating the obvious, or 'kicking in an open door' as it's called in Holland, what abhors me is the incredible self-fulfilling marketing hype around SOA especially when it comes to web services. As if using a search engine which returns results based on popularity and sponsorship, a 'free internet encyclopedia' infested with Astroturfing, on-line applications cycling through a stage of perpetual beta, as if all this isn't enough, there seems to be a large misconception at the CxO level confusing the market-driven enterprise with the marketing-driven enterprise..

I find it mind-boggling how interwoven the hypnotizing kaleidoscope of marketing and advertising has become in an industry where opinion was second to scientific honesty and how it has been taking over an evolutionary movement equal to the introduction and acceptance of databases. Old man Dijkstra would not have been amused.. it reminds me of a story of his where business people objected one of his computer designs because in their perception he had, kind of, been cheating because he had the freedom to choose smart people to work with.. which seems to get to the mis-conceptual core as 'user-friendliness' suffers from. Biased information is bombarded onto us in such large amounts we start believing it, we start many things anew whereas talking with a 50 or 60 year old engineer will teach you some amazing stuff from the times when computers and languages were custom-built, the same thing of which we are more than capable of nowadays but just don't see or allocate time for, because we must keep up with the flow, the endless propagation of what is now and new.

On the other hand, this widespread tendency to take credit on the future has caused a large and reasonably well-defined movement in moving away from isolated monolithic applications towards.. towards what ? Towards another uber-monolithic clutter of ill-defined web service spaghetti ? Towards high-performing lego-style applications with well-defined interfaces for business functions ? Considering economical path dependence and the evolutionary aspect of acceptance of technological innovations, the large majority of initiatives will end up with spaghetti, spaghettini and spaghettoni, which may be more than fine for the issues addressed, but please don't call it SOA. Select a project that is challenging and worthwhile from both business and technology and just start applying SOA as a discipline. Use email, message queues, web services, ftp stations, database level ETL, paperware, whatever, just build an integrated solution and do it architecturally elegant.
Wittgenstein, that nice and logical buddhist from Austria, had this nice dictum, 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'. Don't talk about SOA, just do it.

Fluxology new website

Free interpretation of http://camelcase.blogspot.com/2008/08/fluxology-new-web-site.html:

Since early 2008 Maurizio Turatti and i have been working together via my company The Fluxology Office s.r.l..
Being far too busy with customer's projects and day by day activities, we weren't able to dedicate enough time to create at least a decent presentation web page for the company.
Putting the much needed C of communication back in ICT, here we are.

The website will be enhanced soon with descriptions of the more challenging projects we've been involved with, and our experiences with JavaCAPS will gradually full up our blogs.
We are very excited about the new Sun technologies, the openness shown by the Product Management group around JavaCAPS and the whole of JES, but we are also very aware to address business needs, methodologies and how a long term strategy solidifies into part-projects. Projects stand or fail by the style of it's approach. SUN is gaining a large momentum around consolidating their software and supporting it, and the technological direction of JavaCAPS and related technologies can count on our vote. Of course, the question arises, where do you go for expertise to get the most out of this immensely flexible toolset as well as avoiding any pitfalls. That is why Maurizio and I are working long days to set up a network of business partners and harvest the (dog)years of our practical experience with Java, Open Source, Integration Solutions and what can be done when putting everything together.
SOA, BPM, BAM, ESB, these are all nice buzzwords, but only just part of a new movement. In our experience the act of integrating applications has emerged from the realm of middleware and can now only be seen as totalware, it is not just merely about linking applications together, these applications get submerged into a new system built with an integration toolset. This area is both as old as the term 'Information Technology' and so young we see customers and even SUN struggling to comprehend the business possibilities and the long term impact.
Apart from enabling expert level consultancy, we are therefor working on several designs hooking into and around the JavaCAPS toolset which we are aiming to move into reality during the coming years, exploiting our close connections with JavaCAPS Product Management.
The game has just began.

Prabuh made a great presentation on the new features and some of what lies ahead for JavaCAPS 6 and beyond.

Finally, after some 6 years waiting there is another Horizons event in Munich - Germany.
We expect you there.