Friday’s amuse bouche: The resignation tweet of Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, in Haiku form:
Financial crisis
Stalled too many customers
CEO no more
There is something terribly amusing about a centuries own form of Japanese poetry being the format a of technology firm’s tweet in light of a merger.
I will respond with a haiku of my own:
Crisis — or new boss?
Ellison Runs Oracle
Time to say Buh-Bye
Category: Corporate Management, Humor
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
Many ten thousand
The Dow on CNBC
Before I retire
(interesting we are going Japanese…)
CEO no more
Still, made shitloads of money
Larry can pound salt
bergie-
good one-
I see you study the Haiku form(-:
“Hope Is a Lousy Defense.”
Sun refugee Bill Joy talks about greedy markets, reckless science, and runaway technology. On the plus side, there’s still some good software out there.
By Spencer Reiss
There are geeks and then there’s Bill Joy – 49-year-old software god, hero programmer, cofounder of Sun Microsystems and, until he quit in September, its chief scientist. Beginning in 1976, he spent zillions of hours in front of a keyboard, coding the now-ubiquitous Berkeley strain of the Unix operating system; then he godfathered Sun’s Java programming language and helped design servers that were the Internet’s heaviest artillery. In the early 1990s, he kept his job but bolted Silicon Valley, “leaving the urgent behind to get to the important,” he says. In 2000, he wrote the Wired cover story “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” a Cassandra cry about the perils of 21st-century technology and a striking display of ambivalence from a premier technologist. Now, at home 8,000 feet up in Aspen, Colorado, Joy talks about building a technological utopia while worrying about a techno-apocalypse…
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/billjoy.html
differently, something happenes to your ‘Enterprise Value’ when one of your Founders, correctly, questions the current path of the industry–as Joy did, here: In 2000, he wrote the Wired cover story “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” ..
Man I hate it when I hit submit before I’ve read what I’ve written. Been that kind of day — I thought the markets were going to be flat today… Ha, ha… Anyway, make that:
Larry’s gone sailing
Captain of the Rising Sun
Johny goes golfing…
His resignation
During financial winter
Will have company.
JS made a lot of money when he joined Sun as it purchased his startup Lighthouse Design for it’s crappy application that never worked nor saw the light of day. IIRC, he pulled in North of $20M and bought himself a nice mansion in Pacific Heights. He was a No-Op then and still is. But a rich one for sure and in the end, getting rich is what counts in America. I’d take either of his deals in a NY minute. Now Samurai Larry has a big albatross around his neck just so he can control Oracle RAC HW and MySQL. Hope he has lots of sake and a sharp katana and wakizashi–he’ll need them for the fight ahead. remeber Larry sheath it with the blade up for fast action.
AIG Bailout
Twelve billion kidney stones smile
In Lloyd’s room in hell
Market cathedral
Every time I go long stock
is another prayer.
Sun’s downfall began in 2006 when they moved into their new headquarters in Santa Clara and confirmed Parkinson’s Law of Custom Built Head Offices. The fact that it was built on surplus land from the Agnews Insane Asylum makes it all the more amusing.
The curse of the new headquarters lives! An invitation to flatline.
BR take note. Judging from your new neighbors it might be best to keep the windows closed?
Slowly deflating
Tim and Ben pump desperately
The hiss grows louder
Nice to see the thread migrate to Bill Joy. One of a kind in a once in a lifetime window. And he did it.
No one ever mentions his partner in crime Andy Bechtelsheim (sp) inventor of the SPARC.
What ever happened to him. Retired to the mountains I suppose. Living the good life.
Joy’s observations about MS are dead on. All they ever did was copy what had preceded them. DOS was little more than a cheap knock-off of UNIX.
But when you’re backed by IBM that works.
Bill Joy is an elitist swine. Ask him about his yacht. Ask himeabout the code he “borrowed”, same as the Repugnicon hero. Bill Gates. Both crooks and sociopaths.
@alfred — BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution (of UNIX)) wasn’t exactly original either, and was arguably distributed in violation of their contract with AT&T, and involved some plagiarism of DEC’s source code. Sun (Stanford University Network) Microsystems was highly leveraged by taking Berkeley’s work.
It’s Good to be the King (especially when you get to write the history).
And anyway (since nobody’s here to read this on a snowy Friday night), the only way you make money in technology is to wait for somebody else to do it first, then steal the idea if it works.
MS learned this from IBM. So has Apple. Xerox didn’t.
@bergsten: Great history and observations. I agree totally.
I always wondered about UNIX. They did a great, rare thing in giving out free licenses. Pumped the acceptance. And then they went the profit route.
Everyone in the world accepted BSD UNIX and dumped AT&T UNIX. And then we can get into the Novel thing.
Stupid.
I too bailed out when my company was acquired by Ellison. Best move I ever made. Those who stayed on became part of a ruthless corporate culture that crushes the soul. ORCL’s ridiculous margins are built on the backs of 70 hour weeks and no pay raises for employees.
People of the Sun – get out now.
A friend was laid off from Oracle allegedly because (in his words) he took a few days off for his honeymoon.
Umm, there is more to haiku than three short lines.
There should be at least a reference, perhaps obscure, to a season. For example
Don’t worry, spider,
I am a poor
Housekeeper.
Don’t remember anymore if that is Basho or Issa.
The seasonal association is obscure, but the spider means Fall.
Next, is Buddhism; do no harm to any creature. The speaker means to clear away the spider webs, but reassures the spider that no harm will be done to it.
If anybody is interested in haiku, I found Robert Hass’s translations “The Essential Haiku” helpful. It is a different culture with word associations that are unexpected in English.
Sorry to be so pedantic.
Haiku:
There once was a girl from Nantucket
I stop in cultural confusion
I fail