I just ran across a conversation I had with InformationWeek in 2009, with the catchy title “OpenSolaris: No Standing Still On A Moving Train.” This was not long before the Sun/Oracle acquisition, and yeah, the train sure felt like it was moving at breakneck speed.
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
I’m happy to see the interview caught the gist of Sun’s Solaris message of the time: what was really new wasn’t just about new features (although there were plenty of those), but in how we were delivering change to customers. We had gone all-in on a development/delivery cycle that’s very familiar today, but had almost zero mindshare in “traditional” IT of the time. I think those of us who were at Sun should be very proud of how we executed on our vision, and I’m especially proud of the path we’d charted to do it without blowing up our customers’ collective vision.
The interviewer considered it to be an “unexpected” question that came to his mind as the conversation developed: How do you get people who use software measured in lifetimes of years and decades to move to software lifetimes of mere months? (“Mere months” was considered to be lightning speed in those ancient days of… a few years ago?) But that’s the question we’d all been wrestling with, and I believe the record shows our engineers came up with some solid ways to make that move predictable and logical. My job, as a marketer, was to make the case for that—not always the easiest thing to do, given the amount of legacy angst that was out there.
Here’s a clue as to the challenges we faced and conquered: the interviewer concluded that Sun didn’t need to make our software open source to execute on this vision. Why was that a big deal? Because too many people heard “OpenSolaris” and thought that “open source” was the beginning and end of our value proposition.
The interviewer was right: “open source” by itself does not guarantee improvement. Too often, it means a disinvestment, which was the opposite of what we were doing at Sun. Open sourcing our operating system was very big news, but it still wasn’t the biggest news: Solaris innovation was now moving to our customers at warp speed, without sacrificing its legendary stability.
And of course, our messaging never underplayed the critical role of open source in our strategy. It’s what fueled the growth of the Solaris ecosystem in the early 2000s, and the abandonment of open source was arguably what ultimately put the brakes on the moving train.
In the end, building a software strategy, and communicating that strategy, involves lots of moving parts, and it’s gratifying that this particular interview captured a critical moment in time in a concise snapshot.
