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Jason Stamper's Blog: April 2006 Archives
Gold to hit $1,000 an ounce? Big deal
April 27, 2006
Lord William Rees-Mogg asks a perfectly valid question on his new blog: "Will gold go to $1,000 an ounce?" He notes that it has already risen to $624, and anticipates that it, "might well reach $1,000 an ounce by the end of the second term of President Bush in January 2009". Well it might.
Schwartz's first blog as Sun CEO
April 26, 2006
Jonathan Schwartz has penned his first blog as CEO of Sun Microsystems - a heart-felt tribute to his former boss Scott McNealy.
It's also a reminder that whatever the analysts might write about McNealy's stewardship of Sun from a financial point of view, through thick and thin he has clung to his 'network is the computer' vision. It's also clear to everyone that Schwartz is just as passionate about - and confident in - that viewpoint.
Incidentally, you'll remember that I mentioned in a previous posting about the return on investment of corporate blogs that Schwartz's blog is likely to deliver sound ROI, going on what we know about its traffic and likely lead generation, let alone what it does for Sun's visibility, credibility and branding.
I wonder though if Schwartz will be able to dedicate quite so much time to his blogging now that he is CEO and president of a technology company with a market cap of $17bn and sales last year of over $11bn.
Incidentally I dug out some of the quotes from a brief interview I had with McNealy in the summer of 2003. I asked him what he was most proud of with regards to Sun: "I take a lot of pride in the fact that Sun systems and technologies are used in everything from telemedicine to distance learning to deciphering the human genome to helping businesses run more efficiently," he said.
Asked what he thought he might have done had it not been for Sun, he replied: "I'd like to think I'd be wrapping up an illustrious career in the National Hockey League, which is what I imagined when I was a kid."
As for which technologies will be most important in the enterprise in the coming years, McNealy said: "I think we'll all be surprised by the innovations that come out in the next 10 years. But of the technologies we know about right now, I'd say Java, XML, and the Internet Protocol stack will be the foundation for a lot of what happens in the enterprise well into the future. It's these kind of open standards and cross-platform technologies that have powered huge productivity gains for businesses around the world - and we've barely scratched the surface."
I'm not sure that I agree with Jonathan Schwartz that McNealy is a "hero to us all", but it's unquestionable that Sun's technology has indeed helped to underpin some businesses that we all now take for granted. Of course for that we must thank not just McNealy, but the likes of server designer Andy Betcholsheim, Java inventor James Gosling, and many more of Sun's 38,000 employees.
Our full coverage of the news that McNealy is becoming chairman and making Schwartz CEO is here.
I assembled some of McNealy's wittiest quotes from over the years here.
Scott McNealy's best quotes: a tough comedy act to follow?
April 25, 2006
News that Sun co-founder and long-serving CEO, Scott McNealy is stepping aside, heaps a load of pressure on incoming CEO Jonathan Schwartz - he will have to get working on his anti-Microsoft gags quick-sharp.
Aside from Sun's strategy and his execution of it, McNealy's tenure as CEO will be remembered for his constant Microsoft sniping. Anyone who saw him speak knows he always had a quiver of anti-Microsoft jokes up his sleeve. "I don't want my kids growing up in a world of control-alt-delete," was one of my favourites, or, "The bear is pretty strong in the computer business ... but we are outrunning the other hikers.”
As we reported in our full coverage of McNealy's decision to hand over to Schwartz here, McNealy said that, "When you start a company, you always wonder who you are going to hand it off to. You can't run it forever."
"I wasn't going to hand it off when we were growing too fast," he continued, "I wasn't going to hand if off after the bubble burst. The time is right to do it now. All the demand indicators are strong. For 22 years, I have been running this joint, and I have had a lot of fun with it." He certainly has.
McNealy has been a constant source of amusement in what might otherwise have been a far less interesting sector. He, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, have taken it upon themselves to poke constant fun at Microsoft, and in so doing have helped in their own ways to ensure that consumers have retained that little bit of cynicism about the world's most powerful software company.
In his capacity as CEO McNealy was bright, witty, straight talking, and often with us hacks, more than a little belligerent. Perhaps that's unsurprising - McNealy once said in an interview with CBR that if he had not ended up running an IT company, he would have chosen instead to pass his time thwacking pucks and heads on an ice rink instead. I hear ice hockey is something of a contact sport. At times McNealy got pretty close to turning being a tech firm CEO into a contact sport, too.
I remember one press roundtable in London a couple of years ago, where a journalist from the Financial Times found himself on the wrong end of McNealy's ire. When the journalist asked a question about comments that Sun’s channel had made to him about the soundness of Sun’s business model, McNealy retorted sharply: “I’m not going to comment on made-up quotes.”
Though the journalist insisted the quotes came straight from Sun’s own resellers, McNealy snapped, “Like I say, I will not comment on made-up quotes.” As us press began to leave the room McNealy again accosted the FT journalist, saying he was furious with his paper's editor for stories that had apparently said that McNealy's remuneration had been the cause of a board-room argument. "We haven't even discussed that - it's just been made up," McNealy said furiously.
Anyway like I say if you want the low-down on McNealy's departure and his replacement, Jonathan Schwartz, simply visit our coverage of the news here. I chose instead to assemble a few of the best Scott McNealy quotes from over the years. I warn you though - he could never have given up his day job to become a comedian. Ice hockey, perhaps.
A selection of the best Scott McNealy quotes:
“When Steve Ballmer calls me wacko, I consider that a compliment.”
“The only thing that I'd rather own than Windows is English, because then I could charge you two hundred and forty-nine dollars for the right to speak it.”
"Shut down some of the bullshit the government is spending money on and use it to buy all the Microsoft stock. Then put all their intellectual property in the public domain. Free Windows for everyone! Then we could just bronze Gates, turn him into a statue and stick him in front of the Commerce Department."
"Microsoft is now talking about the digital nervous system... I guess I would be nervous if my system was built on their technology too.”
"It's the good guys versus the bad guys, and the good guys are winning."
“W2K (Windows 2000) will be a bigger disaster than Y2K.”
“A giant hairball." [About Windows NT]
“The Evil Empire." [guess who]
“The beast from Redmond." [yup]
"Anyone heard any good monopolist jokes lately?”
"Ballmer and Butthead" [Ballmer and you-know-who]
".Not, .Not Yet and .Nut" [Microsoft's .Net strategy]
Some of these are thanks to quotefinder thinkexist.com. Others aren't.
My first Web 2.0-style 'mashup'
April 21, 2006
Why have I embedded a clock in my blog? Good question. Here's another: is adding a real-time clock to a blog a Web 2.0-style 'mashup'?
According to Wikipedia, "A mashup is a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience."
Hmmm - more than once source. OK, so if I have more than one clock, set to different time zones, they will be getting their times from more than one source - thus meeting the Wikipedia mashup criteria. So here goes. The clock above is set to GMT. For any of you New Yorkers your time is:
and if you're on the West Coast, the time is:
My brother, who lives in Hong Kong, would probably prefer this one:
For my mum and dad, who have had several beagles (plus two children and one grandson), there's:
And for my old writing mate Lloyd Blythen and any other readers down in New Zealand, here's yours:
There - my first mashup! Dead easy this Web 2.0 business, isn't it? If you're still a Web 2.0 virgin, or frankly don't know what I'm banging on about, you can find out loads about the Web 2.0 phenomenon over at the helpful What's Web 2.0 blog or by reading this excellent piece by Tim O'Reilly, who was one of those who came up with the Web 2.0 moniker in the first place.
Revealed: The first Google homepage
April 19, 2006
There's a glimpse of how the first Google home page looked here - it's quite comic, particularly notes like: "Google is research in progress and there are only a few of us so expect some downtimes and malfunctions."
Other interesting things to note are that there are 'only' around 25 million pages indexed in that early version. By way of comparison, the last known official figure for the size of Google's index was 8.2 billion. That was what Google had said until September last year, when it removed that figure from its pages after Yahoo had claimed the biggest index, with 19.2 billion pages.
Since then Google has stayed mum on the total number of pages in its index, though if you Google for the word 'the' you get 23.8 billion hits, so it's a bit bigger than 8 billion these days. Anyway, both search engine giants note that index size is not the most important factor in effective 'search enginery'. In fact a while back I wrote a daft blog about index sizes and the relative effectiveness of Google, Yahoo and MSN searches at finding Britney Spears pics and the like here.
Other interesting things to note about the original Google home page: Google was initially called Backrub; if no documents matched your search then it returned 20,000 random pages; and the index 'contains only a very limited number of international pages because we do not want to congest busy international links'.
You'll also see over at the page describing the hardware that ran the first version of Google that inventors Sergey Brin and Larry Page were just as zany back then as you would expect - look at their homemade disk box that is held together with Lego.
Another thing that struck me about that original Google home page was that in fact, not all that much has changed if you compare it to Google today. Sure the logo is slightly different, but it still consists of the word Google with multi-coloured letters, like it does today. They also use a white background colour as they do today, and they avoid any graphics on the home page as they have to this day to make the page load as fast as possible.
If you like looking at early versions of web sites you may also like this page, where the so-called Wayback Machine enables you to find an old version of most sites. It's quite scary to see how poorly designed some of the early websites were, but you'll see what I mean if you try it. Oh and of course it's also got a cache of another early Google page - the Google beta site, which looks closer to the Google of today. Googletastic.
The ROI of blogging, and whether Jonathan Schwartz's blog pays for itself
April 04, 2006
Seems the big debate in the 'blogosphere' right now centres on whether corporate blogs generate a return on their investment, or whether they are little more than a cost centre.
Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, apparently gave Shel Israel and Robert Scoble - authors of Naked Conversations, How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers - a hard time when they dropped by at Amazon to evangelise the value of corporate blogs. Vogels wanted hard and fast metrics to back up their arguments, and he felt they couldn't give them to him.
But if one was to try and count the quantitative side, where would one start? I confess maths was among my worst subjects at school, but I had a go at a simple equation to see if I could calculate the ROI of a corporate blog.
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