For the next two days I will be at Startup Camp SF and will be sending in tweets for as along as my laptop batteries last…
Update1: Just discovered an interesting twitter platform service called HashTags. You can follow a larger group of tittering via the startupcamp hashtag.
Update2: SC is being held in same space as this coming week’s JavaOne. They have some of the presentation rooms already setup for JavaOne. I find it funny how many of the presentations are running from IBM Thinkpads running Windows. Back during the days of McNealy this would never have been allowed… 🙂
Update3, End of Day 1: Startup Camp Day 1 was a bit of droning on by panelist stating the obvious (but repetition can be the key to ensuring your doing the right thing), with some interesting conversations and networking. I did find it interesting how a lot of the topics that were being talked about in the Web2.0 space were at the core of things selling. And yet, that key word was never mentioned. Nothing happens until you sell something…even if it’s just your idea.
I did find this morning’s Key Note address by Jonathan Schwartz rather interesting. A good friend of mine is a Director of Sales within Sun. When He joined Sun a few years back, he talked about how the corporate culture was still hardware based. Schwartz’s key note showed his view of the company is not just hardware centric. He talked about how different people have different views of Sun. But I found it interesting how all these views (including the one he gave) were all product centric. No talk of solutions. With all these products, when will Sun realize that they need to start providing solutions around these products? There are pockets of this within Sun (my friend being one of them), but I find it interesting how the top of the company still views Sun in a product centric way.
Sun has promoted a lot of open source technologies into the market but has had limited success in building OSS credibility I suppose if Sun starts to build up solutions then they will end up in a similar configuration to IBM.
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Good Point Phillip. The problem is that there is confusion about what Sun “is”. Jonathan admitted that today himself. And yet he had an audience of 800+ people and didn’t do anything to set the record straight of what “Sun is”.
I feel they are still about moving licenses. And the software group is rocking right now in that area. And what else is OSS for but to be a low cost way of seeding the market to upsell maintenance and services.
The advantage of having a collection of OSS product expertise is to package them together to make a solutions to solve customer’s problems and differentiate yourself in the industry.
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