I had an interesting Friday, up and down the Peninsula and with lots of tasty flavors.
First off, I went back to Supernova, if only because Jonathan Schwartz, who’s my boss’ boss, was talking; it was a relaxed dialogue with host Kevin Werbach. I don’t think I heard anything I hadn’t heard before, but there’s a part of Jonathan’s message these days that isn’t getting reported that much. Everyone always asks him “aren’t you worried that your business is getting commoditized?” and he answers “Well, if you look around, some of the world’s biggest and most successful companies are in commodity businesses like oil and RAM and rubber and sugar.”
Then I struggled up 101 to San Fran to do a talk for a bunch of “Java Ambassadors,” senior Sun tech-support guys who work with big names like Boeing and Accenture and pretty well every other major company you ever heard of. I don’t know if I was educational for them, but they were damn educational for me... in my first job out of school, I used to be a junior version of one of these people. I think that everyone who’s got any kind of a strategy role at Sun ought to spend a couple hours with this gang once or twice a quarter.
I was finished by two and couldn’t face the freeway fight back down to Supernova, so I awarded myself a couple hours off. I blew $140 on music in the Virgin store around the corner (expensive, but good selection), then strolled in to the downtown San Fran Apple store, which is awfully nice. They have a little theater section with soft chairs and good wireless and all of a sudden I was back at work. Is this civilized or what; eventually an Apple droid came along and gave an interesting little presentation on Soundtrack; best of all, he didn’t seem to mind in the slightest that most of the audience were just refugees from the streets getting a little WiFi time in.
And now it’s a busy weekend, I got sucked slightly into a sideshow of a sideshow of the massive corporate spasm required to stage Java One. The show better be good.
