Today, Don Tapscott, author of “Wikinomics” presented a keynote about how mass-collaboration is changing the way that value is created in the world economy. This stems from both software functionality and network economies of scale. Obviously the enablement of new forms of economic co-operation is also a factor at continuing to drive specialisation. Tapscott quotes Carr’s “IT does matter” and mentions that he has often debated with him, which is hard because Carr is good, but he (Tapscott) says “I have an advantage in this debate, he’s wrong”. The last three days has made me question about how one can innovate in corporate IT. …
Project Blackbox, it’s real you know
Yesterday, Sun’s Project Blackbox Tour visited the Thames Valley at Sun’s UK HQ Campus and today we have taken it to the National Army Museum so prospective customers, journalists and analysts can inspect it and ‘kick the tyres’, and I am one of the engineers answering the mediumly hard questions. The really difficult ones have been handled by Joe Carvalho, one of the designers. …
Sun’s Connected Customers
Steve Wilson led a presentation about the changing nature of Sun’s connected customer response and where the provisioning and image maintenance tools now sit. This means that he’s responsible for network support, subscription services and what’s left of our N1 management suite. …
Coming to a Desktop near you
Or near me anyway, and not necessarily all that soon! This morning’s presentation on the Sun Ray technology road map suggests we’re planning to to do local VPN some time this year and Video next year. Its getting there! The presentation covered a number of technologies showing Sun recommitting to the desktop and offering a number of Linux/Windows interoperability solutions …
The economics of open source in the world of storage.
Brian Wong, one of Sun’s Distinguished Engineers spoke this morning and stated categorically that the “Storage [Market] is right to be disrupted”. He argued that the general purpose OS (such as Solaris) offers massive developer economies of scale, by which we mean operating system developer economics. …
The Future of Solaris, by the man that makes it happen
Jeff Jackson, VP of Solaris opened our conference. He’s now been in the job for a while and is beginning to stamp his own ideas on the future of Sun’s implementation of OpenSolaris. He characterised his view as moving from function to velocity; velocity has a direction. He wants Solaris releases to meet a customer constituency rather than become the result of a race between his developers. …
My Laptop Marathon, installing Open Solaris & liveupdate
After mixing it in a conversation about what Solaris needs to make me use it as my Laptop operating system of choice I was persuaded to trash my Linux build (Fedora 3.5) which was broken and unusable anyway, mainly because the update manager was completely shagged. (I’m in good company, see Eric Raymond’s goodbye to Red Hat). …
Lessons from Sun Live 2007
Sun had a customer jamboree today, and I documented my attendance on my Sun Oracle blog in a couple of articles, covering sustainability, teleworking & productivity, James Gosling on Java and CPU architecure, design and specialisation and the nature of innovation. …
How much is my blog worth?
I originally wrote a piece on the toys being developed claiming to value a blog. The various algorithms were pretty primitive and this article talks of two, one of which remains functional one, of which does not. …
Designing both sides of the coin
I wrote a piece about Sun’s short term future based on two pieces of optimism. The first was a third quarter of revenue growth, and a first of profitability for a while, the second was the hope that the systems market would permit competition through differentiation. I said, “At Sun’ we’ve just returned to profitability with our third quarter of revenue growth in a row and as some very famous economist said, three data points are a trend. One of the insights underpinning our strategy is that Sun innovates and monetises intellectual property. …