title: Sun Changing Symbol to JAVA: The Fallout Begins link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2007/08/24/sun-changing-symbol-to-java-the-fallout-begins/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 656 created: 2007/08/24 18:22:00 created_gmt: 2007/08/24 18:22:00 comment_status: open post_name: sun-changing-symbol-to-java-the-fallout-begins status: publish post_type: post

Sun Changing Symbol to JAVA: The Fallout Begins

Yesterday, Jonathan Schwartz announced in his blog that the company would be changing it’s stock ticker symbol to JAVA. You can read the blog post for the details. I came across this particularly insightful rant in the comments and think it deserves to be republished in full.

Jonathan, if you are committed to Sun’s success, I have a simple recipe: Fire California.

The whole state.

Seriously. Sun in California is a filter that catches and keeps people who can’t get a job with better prospects at one of the legions of startups that grow like weeds in the silicon valley. It is the most astonishing center of incompetence on the planet. The economics are such that it can’t be fixed. Please put it out of its misery.

We have extraordinary engineers in other locales where we can hire the best and the brightest. As long as the least capable group of employees wields ultimate decision-making power, we waste most of our most competent employees’ best work.

Fire the lawyers who send cease-and-desist letters to companies that redistribute OpenSolaris and have the common-sense to use the word Solaris and thus enhance our own brand at no cost to us. Fire the corporate marketing dipsts who blow a million on ads for developer tools in the Wall Street Journal. Fire the branding dipsts who wouldn’t know a brand if it bit them on the ass and are more concerned about turf than making this company a success. Fire the directors who need to pee on the furniture like incontinent poodles to make it their furniture and think the way to do that is by renaming our products (for the 20th time) and have no conception of how that destroys adoption and brand recognition.

Really, if you want evidence that Sun is a filter that aggregates, collects and cultivates incompetence, there is no better evidence than our own corporate marketing. People don’t start out this pathologically inept - this level of dysfunctionality has to be carefully bred and cultivated.

And this whole boomerang thing…I’ll try to be gracious and avoid naming names, but what the hell are we doing bringing back the very people who drove this company into the ground in the first place? Boomerang indeed. The only question is whose neck the boomerang ends up wrapped around.

Heck, trace my IP address and it can be my neck. Big deal…

I work for Sun. In California. I’m putting my money where my mouth is (or vice versa). Fire me. Please. Just promise me that the dips**t menagerie we’ve built here will go with me.

I own far too much Sun stock. If you take my advice, I lose my job. Ironic that I’m sure being fired would increase the chances I retire fat and happy, isn’t it?

A friend of mine in the VC business once told me the secret to the silicon valley’s sucess was “we don’t penalize failure.” But that doesn’t mean we should nurture and cherish it.

Do I actually want to get fired? No. But I want to work for a company I can respect. And there is a lot of rot right at the heart of this one. It’s not evil, its not malice, it’s unchallenged people living up to low expectations.

Posted by A Sun Employee on August 24, 2007 at 01:55 AM PDT #

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