What would you ask Jonathan Schwartz?

Why is Sun still relevant?

What do you see for the future of "Java on the Desktop"?

Ask him if Dvorak is spot on about a Sun/Apple merger. (he went over reasons in the latest TWiT)

And how he's going to like working "for" Steve Jobs ;-)
Ya, I know, I'm being a smart ass.

JimW: I can already answer that one cause I asked. The answer is a straight up: "no."

Ask "if and when" the big business sector will adopt the 2.0 version of the web? Sun says they are the dot in 2.0 (actually Tim Berners-Lee created the dot and it is about public access) yet their products in use house a lot of non-dot data on the racks, databases,intranet, extranet--not internet, Hosted solutions, file access, user generated information...

Will they ever get beyond security issues? Control?

Im getting a 403 when I try to access His Blog

Weird, it's up here. What browser you using?

Firefox 1.5.0.6


*****************
Access Denied
Status Code 403
Message
Type
Exception You do not have the privilege necessary to access the page you requested.
*****************

Weird, now I'm getting that error.

Troy: I just wrote to Sun's PR team to let them know they need to kick a server or something.

I'd be interested to know if he can share any of Sun's planned green computing initiatives. Sun's plans for servers that run cooler and are more energy-efficient would be what I'd like hear Jonathan talk about. I'm a .NET enterprise developer kinda guy during the day, so there won't get any Java questions from me ;)

Ask him how he feels about Eric Schmidt.

Jonathan link is working now!

@5 of course he said no. You think he'd tell you yes if it were true? Sheesh!

LayZ: it wasn't him, it was people who work for him but, yeah, I do expect to be told the truth when I ask. I know that doesn't always happen but that's what I expect.

With the rising popularity of AJAX desktops, do you think that thin clients will make a come back? Do you see sun selling thin clients to people that use sever side resources to deliver the internet to them?

many people just need a basic PIM, browser, and IM client, i don't see why a thin client couldn't do this. make it a little IP box like vonage has, that connects to the server on your end.

basically tell him if he sees thin clients coming back lol.

Whatever happen to Looking Glass and Jini. Were these projects overhyped? Are there plans to release the source code for these projects?

I once overheard Jonathan giving some CNET writers are REALLY hard time about their coverage of Sun. I'm sure it was off the record, but I'd love to find out what his beef was with them (or vice versa). Also, I'd like to learn more about the companies incredible blogging freedom that they allow employees and how it's helped to grow their business.

Have fun!
Doug

Whats next?

When will we see an OS that does nothing more than run a browser and a few browser plugins?

Mr Schwartz,
1. What advice would you give to geek engineers who are thinking of venturing out on their own?
2. What would you say to engineers who have to contend with the bizzare world of office politics?
3. How would you encourage the general public to develop an interest in Solaris administration and Java programming? (yuk yuk, tough one there :P)

Thanks Scoble.

Robert: The trailing slash in Jonathan's URL is causing that 403 error.

Use: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan

-- Jack Krupansky

Ask him about the SUN stock price. When will it start going north?

Why is Sun so confused about their strategy? Sometime they talk about giving away their hardwar to sell services and sometimes they talk about giving away their software to sell hardware.

I'd like to know when Jonathan gets time to blog. Does he set aside time to blog or annotate things he wants to write about? Or is he a free-form blogger and blogging just happens?

In Ireland, most CEOs won't blog because of competing time pressures or insecurity about the results. Seeing Sun's top gun with a blog challenges some of those hesitations.

Ask Jonathan if McNealy should have stepped down sooner? If McNealy had, Ed Zander may have been CEO of Sun instead of CEO of Motorola. Does Jonathan keep in touch with Zander? When is Sun coming out with a VIZR ;-)

The origin of the concept for WEB SERVICES (J2EE)


The complete concept from conception to completion for the idea and implementation of Web Services

Also...

The pros and cons of each of the major SOAs

Also...

What happened to the idea for a JAVA Browser

Also...

Will SUN develop a Search Engine or Search Technology

Please ask him why it is such a hassle to install an up-to-date version of Apache and PHP on those spiffy new servers they sell? They'd sell more if they weren't so focused on Java all the time.

In the late 90's I worked for a mid-sized Sun Reseller, was even certified to support Sun's servers up to nearly their E10k machines (great training back then btw).

In the early 2000's I, along with many many other startups (and large firms) didn't buy any Sun Servers, instead chose to use an assortment of servers running linux.

Now, in the mid-2000's Sun makes some great servers (and even reasonably affordable) but what are the compelling reasons for me, as an entrepeneur or as a consultant, to choose a Sun Server over a grid of standard servers.

More critically, how will Sun as a business survive as storage, memory and CPU costs all continue to come down into the foreseeable future? And especially as more and more systems are designed not for "big iron" single servers but for large grids (i.e. think Google's server farms). The only reasonable way to build "internet scale" systems these days is to plan on building them on a grid model from the beginning - i.e. any single server, however great, may crack under the strain of being on top of Digg, being Slashdoted, BoingBoinged or TechCrunched.

In the face of those trends, what is Sun's message?

And where (and do?) Sun's reseller partners and others such as individual consultants fit into the picture?

Shannon

(Shannon Clark, MeshForum - http://www.meshforum.org)

Thanks Robert. Here is my question.

BlogEverywhere runs Fedora Linux on Dell hardware. The backend is a Java based server (Tomcat) with a MySQL DB. How would Jonathan convince me to move to Sun hardware and/or Solaris OS?

Our service is very new (and very beta!) so this is probably the best time for a switch - i.e. it's now or never.

Shiraz Kanga
Founder & CTO
BlogEverywhere.com
http://www.blogeverywhere.com

Totally agree with comment #25 re: "Why is Sun so confused about their strategy?".

As i read your post (before reading that comment), I was forming the exact same question...not that Sun PR isn't scouring every line of these comments but if you get your facts in line beforehand, that would be a pretty hardhitting question.

Booger

Sun now has some really great entry-level servers - perhaps the best in the industry. However, it doesn't have any entry-level storage offerings to go with these servers. That's a problem for customers, because it means it's impossible to buy a complete entry-level "server + storage solution" from Sun (which you can easily do from Dell)

My question is: is Sun planning to address this gap in its entry-level storage offerings?

Sun re-wrote the storage rule-book with their new Thumper product - Enterprise storage for $2 per GB. If they introduced, say, a 2TB storage product for $2 per GB, customers would be beating down their doors.

When are they going to release something that consumers identify with? I think this is Windows main strength. Imagine if Windows were only at work, no one would know or care about it. Same goes for Sun.

Have you seen growth in the Sun Grid Compute Utility? While I find this to be a remarkable resource I haven't seen much (any?) marketing. Is this the future of high speed computation? Will people outsource intense computation much like they are outsourcing storage?

Does he think that JDE can compete against .net?

There has been a lot of talk about the evolution of business development to a BD 2.0 (http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/08/business_deve... http://profitablesignals.com/blog/?p=35)

Interestingly, you talked about before the meme was even popular on your blog long when writing "The Death of the Cold Call" http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/customers_y...

While this is a very interesting perspective with how Sun "approaches" developing customers, I would be very interested in how you would recommend organizations "approach" Sun about partnering?

1. What does he see as "the middle game / endgame" for MS Office vs Open Office? Is OpenOffice going to grow in scope or was this just an experiment. Will the Office Suite battles kill MS?

2. How long will Google dominate Search? Online Revenues? Why?

Joe Hunkins
Talent, Oregon
http://joeduck.wordpress.com

What does Mr. Schwartz think about Java Rich Internet Application (RIA) approaches such as Canoo's UltraLightClient that offers a 100% Java/Swing
alternative to AJAX?

What will Sun do to strengthen Java on the desktop?

The really good questions will never be answered or, most likely, never even allowed to be asked.

Number one would be why doesn't Sun quit trying to swim up and ever increasingly huge stream and sell now to return some sort of value to their shareholders?

Why does almost every company seem to feel it's their feduciary duty to run their companies into the ground despite years of forewarning that it's going to happen and then leave shareholders with nothing?

Why does Schwartz not realize that Sun is about as relevant in today's computing world as pets.com and the sock pupet are to today's web?

Those are more slanted opinions than questions, but even the real questions behind them will never be answered.

Did John Doerr leave the board on account of pretexting? :)

Intel is doing 10,000, you going to match them? It's the trendy in thing you know. Least another 5,000...

So charity work after Sun Micro's certain demise? Maybe you can join the Gates Foundation, and buy up Newspaper Empires, under the guise of charity.

Golden parachute all in order?

Why is java so verbose? The for loop syntax introduced in 1.5 is but a fractional step in the right direction, made ten years too late. Assume IDEs that save you from typing the syntax are not an answer in the same way that a crutch is not an answer for a man with a broken foot. I want my code more readable! It should be about _what_ i'm doing (in my domain), not _how_. Thanks :)

From Carol:

"What are you doing to gain back market share from AIX?"

Robert,

Please ask him "What was SUN thinking when they bought Cobalt Networks and then promptly killed the most popular line of appliance servers in the web hosting industry? They had a chance to take a great product and improve it not to mention dominate the hosting market, but instead dropped the ball and lost huge market share to Dell." Tragic $2 Billion dollar mistake in my book.

Instead of releasing Solaris as an also-ran Open Source OS, why not become the premier Linux Enterprise provider? You could have approved, tested hardware configurations and support offerings, add some proprietary tools, and use those extra dev hours in OSS projects that help everyone, rather than struggling to help Solaris keep up with the Joneses.

In light of the Perkins shakeup at HP... Might ask him how relations are amongst the board at Sun (specifically, Doerr). I'm sure it's confidential... But, you don't get what you don't ask for.

Hi Robert. Great idea. I'd like ask the following:

1. What have been the top three benefits for him / Sun of running his blog?

2. What would he like to accomplish in engaging his customers that the blog or other existing tools (such as forums) have not allowed him to do?

-- brian

You have 2 minutes. Convince me to switch from Microsoft.Net to a Sun solution.