It is no difficult trick to bring a great deal of energy, study and native ability into Wall Street and to end up with losses instead of profits. These virtues, if channeled in the wrong directions, become indistinguishable from handicaps.
Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor
When marketing people drive company acquisitions you can expect peculiar results.
Consider Nokia. They bought
Trolltech, yet they used
GTK over Qt in
Maemo5 (though I am hearing they 'll switch to Qt in the next version).
What about Novel? The acquired
Ximian (founded by Gnome hackers), yet they offer KDE as the default SuSE Linux desktop (true, they where probably more interested in Mono).
Go figure...
I always thought that Open Coffee was just one part of the equation: surely, networking opportunities are important for bootstrapping an ecosystem of entrepreneurs. But a great idea doesn't guarantee a successful business. Neither does technical savvy. more
This picture was taken after the first "agreement" on the Paulson bailout plan. The secretary assures us that everything is OK. At the time I was struck by the obvious mismatch of the announcement and the expression on the faces. So, I kept the photo. You know the rest of the story...
It is amazing to see one person (or more accurately a small group of people, led by a single person) turn up the fortunes of a company. This is what I think Jonathan Swartz has accomplished. And quite spectacularly so!
First there was OpenSolaris, then OpenSparc the first open source processor (!!!!!!!!), Cool threads/Niagara, the ultra cool new AMD powered servers, Project BlackBox (incredible idea), Sun Grid, hiring the JRuby programmers…
And now, Java released under the GPL license. Nothing short of stunning!
Sun is a company to watch!
