I unplug for one little week and...

A bunch of stuff happens.

• Ronald Regan dies
• Sun says they're goona open the source to Solaris (it's about time)
• Sun also says they're gonna open the source to Java (ditto)
• Sun unleashes their employee weblogs (woah!)

Does this much happen every week and I just don't notice because I'm not seeing it in summary mode?

I have to say, the first and last really caught me by surprise. The other two were inevitable. Well, the first one was too but it's just one of those things that there's never a "right time" for.

The last one, however, is interesting. It's expected in some ways and surprising in others but not necessarily inevitable. Why? It's a risk. Possibly a big one.

Ever since Tim went to work at Sun, I knew they were going to be doing something more with RSS and weblogs. He made no secret of that. I suspect this is not all of it.

It occurs to me that Sun is getting back to its roots a bit with this risk taking. Well, that is if you think about Unix as being in Sun's roots. Stay with me here...

Unix, even today, is a beast which is simultaneously very powerful and very dangerous. There's an old saying about Unix not being user friendly and that it provides the user with more than enough rope to hang him or herself.

Employee weblogs coming out of public company like Sun are similar. If things work out, a ton of great stuff will certainly come from this. If, on the other hand, employees are not careful or don't quite realize what they're doing, all hell can break loose.

I've been thinking about this sort of thing quite a bit over the last year. I've not written much about it (for mostly obvious reasons), but I've had a few of those moments--when someone appears at my cube and asks me to join them in a conference room for a discussion about something I've written on my weblog. In one of those cases I ended up removing a post shortly after the meeting.

At one point, I even went back to my desk and declared: "I give up. This is more trouble that it's worth. From now on, I'm never blogging about work related stuff again." And that lasted all of 4 days, I think.

The good news is that things were always civil and reasonable and I've now have a better idea of what is and is not reasonable--at least today. That means I don't screw up as often and "they" don't have to come talk with me.

Anyway, I congratulate Sun on taking the risk. I've long wondered how a gamble like this might pay off. During the time last year I was beating a different weblog drum at work, I tried to imagine a world where stuff like this happened.

Now it has arrived.

Time to trade in my old drum for a new one?

Perhaps. We'll see what happens.

One thing is for sure: we live in interesting times.

Posted by jzawodn at June 06, 2004 08:22 PM