Year: 2010

I am a member of the Microsoft Political Action Committee.  Even though I am no longer at Microsoft I maintain close relations with fellow MSPAC members and am still invited to events.  The other day they had Michael Brown, founder of a non-profit called City Year.  Before speaking he showed a video of teachers, administrators and supporters.  Among those supporters was an attorney named Joel Klein.  Had Michael showed this video 10 years earlier he would have been escorted out of the room.  For those who did not follow or do not remember, Mr Klein was the lead attorney for the Department of Justice in their landmark case of the US versus Microsoft.  Since I had already decided the DOJ would be my next topic I can only say “how fortunate can a blogger be?”.

The winds of the DOJ had already started following the release of Windows 95.  As Netscape started to lose ground in the browser war it was increasingly clear that they would not be able to compete.  Internally around 1997 or 1998 a memo went around in email written by Jim Alchin.  It was pretty simple – Microsoft should leverage its greatest asset in the browser wars, the Windows Operating System.  Even at that time I did not think twice, it made total sense for Microsoft to bundle the browser with the operating system.  However the industry did not see things the same way and so the rumors began to swirl and build. 

 The case had already begun in Spring of 1998.  At the Microsoft Global Sales Summit in 1999, held in San Francisco it was almost eery how the DOJ cast a shadow over the event. . For starters on the opening night everyone went to the usual reception part, everyone froze their butt off.  Unlike previous events in Orlando, New Orléans or San Diego, we were not trying to cool off with a beer or six.  It was a cold summer night in San Francisco.  It brought to life the famous Mark Twain quote, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer night in San Francisco”.  The event lacked luster after that.  There were no big product releases, nothing really to rally around.  When Ballmer did his keynote he ran around the audience like a crazed lunatic (he still does to this day).  When he finally settled down and got onstage it took him 5 minutes to catch his breadth.  I thought he was going to have a heart-attack.  I thought to myself, not only is the company being  targeted by the DOJ, now one of our key executives is going to die on stage in front of 10,000 people.  I remember leaving MGS that year not as in love with the company as I had been in the past.  It seemed like we had lost something.  On a good note the last evenings entertainment was the B-52’s!!

Back at corporate it was very hard I believe on all the employees.  For starters for those of you who hate big government and don’t believe they can do anything right, this is not your story.  However you feel about Microsoft, anti-trust, or government intervention in markets etc..the DOJ from a marketing and PR standpoint simply crushed Microsoft.  It was embarrassing.  At one internal company town hall an employee got up obviously flustered and said “I don’t even recognize the company being portrayed in the media”.  It was sad, but how true it was.  Every executive who testified in court seemed over matched from the start.  It seemed every day I went to work during the trial that nothing was going well.  I was traveling a lot in those days around the country meeting with customers.  It seemed like every conversation had to start with a talk about the state of the DOJ case.  To the DOJ’s credit every mistake made on the stand was a chance to show the world via the cable networks how bad we were, they were always attacking and we were always defending.  As much as executives tried to say don’t worry about the DOJ just focus on your work, in the age of the internet it was just impossible to ignore.

As the case wound down Netscape was aquired by AOL.  It put some temporary brakes on the DOJ momentum, but not much.  The Microsoft take was the technology industry was too innovative and fast paced, that change would happen by itself and needed to regulation.  As Windows and Office today slowly begin to die I feel that was true then and is still true today.  But to try and explain to courts and the public was difficult.  In hearings before congress you would have Scott McNeely and Jim Barksdale sitting next to Steve and Bill.  Scott and Jim talked about the challenges of competing against a “monopoly”.  The case was essentially about Microsoft’s ability to use the OS to bundle new software offering thus limiting the ability of the competition.  In this case the new software offering was the browser. Bill would say this was the weakest case that could have  been brought against Microsoft.  Had they gone after the OEM business, in my opinion, the case could have got ugly fast.

I had a business trip scheduled back east in November of 2000.  I was on United Airlines flying to Washington DC and had brought my latest issue of Wired Magazine.  It was titled “The Truth,  The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth” by John Heilermann.  It was a very long and thorough article on the inner workings of the DOJ trial.  How the DOJ was pushing hard to get Steve Jobs to testify, the emotional toll the case was taking on Bill Gates, how the Microsoft competition were lobbying on Capitol Hill.  It took me all 5 hours on the plane to read the article and when I landed I was tired.  From a Microsoft standpoint the article was emotional and hard to swallow.  Could this be true?

On the way home from DC I was with a fellow co-worker Janet Wu.  We were in the United Red Carpet club.  As everyone did we went to laptop lane.  This was still Dotcom boom time so every plane was cramped and the airport was always super busy. In laptop lane you had wall to wall modems set up so it was just a question of finding space and getting connected.  Getting connected was not easy.  You had to VPN in and of course it was all dial-up.  I had a Toshiba laptop and found a spot.  Janet was at the other end.  I remember I struggled trying to get connected.  I finally got frustrated and went down to see if Janet had got connected.  She had so I went back to my laptop sand sat down and…Iwas connected!!  The strange thing was in my inbox the fonts were different and I had a lot of emails from executives.  I remember Steve Guggenheimer (now a VP at MS)  had sent me an email.  I was a bit confused by my new found popularity.  I looked to the person next to me, but the chair was empty.  They had a Toshiba laptop too.  Son of a bitch I had sat down at the wrong laptop!! When the person came back I apologized..greatly, as it was clear this was a person of some power.  Turns out the person  was David Heiner, anti-trust attorney.  I had just been reading emails about one of the largest cases of the century.  Of course it did raise questions of David’s basic knowledge of PC Security.  We left, Janet and I to catch our flight.

I got to my seat ( a middle seat!!) on United’s filled to capacity flight back to Seattle and who should sit next to me..David Heiner!!  We got to talking and I learned the David was now starting to focus on what was going in Europe as they spun up their own case through the European Union (EU).  I then mentioned that I had read the article in Wired Magazine.  David lit up, “that article is absolute bullshit!!” He then proceeded to go on a small little tirade on why.  However in the end as the conversation winded down he uttered the words I’ll never forget, “…but man that guy had good sources”.  I guess it was all true.

As it became increasing clear that Microsoft was not going to win  the remedy plans started to surface.  One thing I never understood was the scenarios that were being proposed to break Microsoft up.  Some were stupid.  One was an idea to follow the baby Bell model.  We would have had regional OS’s – I don’t think anyone took that seriously.  Others wanted to separate the Office and Windows business.  Split off the MSN business.  In the end the settlement  that was finalized on Nov 2, 2001 was what many view as a slap on the wrist.  Microsoft was allowed to continue to bundle software withe OS, but had to share some API’s.  Many view the settlement as a failure, but the tarnish to Microsoft’s public image had been done.

Reflecting back the DOJ trial was a titanic shift for Microsoft and it’s employees.  It hurt everyone there at the time.  It was a loss of our innocence.  I would get very involved with the MSPAC after the events of the DOJ, because to sit outside the political game was no longer reality.  Gone were the days of admiration just because you worked at Microsoft.    The arrogance and self confidence that had created Microsoft’s success was now a detriment.  Soon there after the brain drain would begin.  There was a time when no one left Microsoft, but things were changing and there were exciting things happening elsewhere in the industry.  It was a challenging time to be at Microsoft and it was a time I will never forget.

I guess it is time to get back to the focus of my blog which is my career at Microsoft.  We are into 1998 moving quickly to 1999.  Though it had not been by design I had landed myself in the middle of the Dotcom bubble.  Our telesales organization was sought after by many  within Microsoft as we called on Internet Service Providers around the country, we were capturing intelligence and were on the front line of understanding what the customers were looking for, but in many cases the customers did not know what they wanted.  Our group wa literally talking to the pulse of what was becoming the internet. Everybody had big ideas and grand visions. I will try and break down the Dotcom boom into two phases: Access and Applications.

The first part of the bubble was all about access.  How do I get on the internet and who is providing the service.  A lot of people thought that the service piece was going to make them a lot of money.  The big names in terms of “dial-up” users were AOL, Mindspring, Earthlink, Compuserve and a few others.   There was a whole host of companies that started up and spent the first years laying down the fiber or probably a better term the “backbone” of the internet.  These were companies like Qwest (before they acquired US West), Level 3, Williams Communications, Savvis, Global Crossing and a whole host of others. The Telco’s were really not in the game yet though everyone knew they were coming, the same could be said for the Cable providers.  Those two industries owned the most important piece, what we called the last mile.  They owned the fiber that ran into the home.  Another entity that had access to the home was the utility companies – and there were a few that played around with internet access offering.  So what was Microsoft’s strategy in this phase?  Well first and foremost it was about the browser and getting ahead of Netscape.  It did not matter whether they were large or small, we wanted them to deploy Internet Explorer.  Over time this was actually successful as Netscape tried to monetize the browser and Microsoft gave away for free (eventually as part of the operating system).  The second item was getting service providers to use our software to deliver email, hosting services etc..This proved a daunting task as none of our software and been designed.  One of the early whiteboard sessions I sat in on was a discussion around the internet infrastructure, and what was clear is once you left the desktop and got on the wire it was all Unix.  As usual Microsoft thought that needed to be changed.

Before we launch into the second phase an update on what was happening organizationally. Our group under Linda Griffin was changing to at this time, a colleague David George, left Microsoft for his exciting dotcom opportunity (what we called the expensive MBA program).  He joined a Dallas based hosting company called Data Return.  Our relationship with our friends in the Internet Customer Unit would change as well.  They had hired a new director, Mark Chestnut, who was returning to Microsoft.  This  would set in motion the move of the telesales team from our home in Ridgewood over to the main Microsoft campus, so in the middle of 1999 Ken Fiore, Steve Bissell and our new hire Sean Maplethorpe would move to Mark’s team.  In addition to this move Mark hired a middle manager, the Frenchman, Pascal Martin.   On top of all this Cameron Myhrvold, who was VP of ICU was leaving Microsoft and being replaced by the former head of Microsoft Germany, Thomas Koll.  The name of ICU was changed to the Network Service Providers Group.

As we moved into 1999 I was still covering Canada and the Central region of the United States.  Early in 1999 I was asked to fly to Houston to meet with an Application Service Provider called Interliant.  It would be a chance meeting that would lead to one of the more exciting opps in account management with Microsoft.   Interliant was not an access provider they were providing application services to customers.  Specifically they were offering Lotus Nots apps.  The idea was that a company could host your application rather than the customer having to support it on premise.  Thus they did not need to buy hardware or hire application developers.   This, for me, would launch into the second phase of the Dotcom boom – the application service provider phase.

As the second phase kicked off of the internet  boom it was again being spear-headed to a large degree by Sun.  They had hit upon this idea that software should run like a utility.  Your computer should turn on just lie your light.  It made for good PR and great marketing slogans, it was a bit far from reality, but I think that the basic idea fueled a lot of what the application service provider model was all about.  Before we knew it we had account lists and most of the accounts one the list were these so – called ASP’s.  I had a bunch – Interliant, Corio, CenterBeam, Exodus, Interland, AIT, Data Return, Excite@home, Equant, Allegrix and a bunch more.  They were all over the country and I flew all over the country hearing about their grand schemes.  Everyone had pretty much the same idea – we will deliver an application and you pay us a monthly fee based on users, hours etc..Some were more ambitious than others.  Corio had a former Oracle exec as CTO, Tom Spagnola, who wanted to deliver cookie cutter CRM apps built with Siebel.  For those who have used Siebel, stop laughing and stay with me.  For those who have never used CRM software let me say this;  every customer I have dealt with wants to feel special and how they receive and deliver software is no exception, there is always something specific to their business that they want or need because it makes them unique.  It’s a simple concept because at its core its human nature.

As things progressed NSG got into a new business – investments.  At the time NSG covered big and small, they had acct execs on ATT, SBC, Bell Atlantic, Lucent, Cisco down to the start-ups that I worked with etc..and though many were not using our software we did have one thing they needed…cash.  And so the investment game began.  At first they were big – ATT received a huge infusion of over $500 million.  The Microsoft CFO at the time was Greg Maffei.  Unlike earlier CFO’s who manged money, Greg liked the deal.  In time that would put him at odds with Steve Ballmer.  If I have time I will come back to my investment deals.  They were fun and a great learning experience in negotiations.

Another thing that was happening was many of these companies were going public.  As an account executive I started receiving offers to participate in the friends and family plans for these startups.  At first I was a bit hesitant because I felt there may some conflict of interest, but at the time Microsoft had no policies on this so I jumped on two offers I received at Interliant and Data Return.  I did end up making a bit of money in the long run, but had I sold at the peak of the bubble I would have made a lot more.  Later on executive VP Jeff Raikes would send out an email saying to “stop” this practice of participating in these offerings.

On a personal note somewhere during this chaos I added more chaos to my life.  On February 24th, 1999 Jean and welcomed the birth of our first child, Henrik Thomas Mernaugh Hoffmann.  Had our last name stated with a “L” instead of an “H” his initials would have been HTML.  That is a technical joke so for those who are not technical please ignore.  It was a difficult birth that left little Henrik in intensive care at the University of Washington Hospital.  It was a difficult way to start parenthood.   Luckily two weeks later we were able to bring him home.  He still lives with us. 

During this period the world seemed at everyone’s feet, people were making money hand over fist, the start-ups were young and exciting, when we went to events like ISPCon in San José, it was just party after party.  I was on the jet setter life style traveling 2-3 weeks every month.  But amidst it all things were not all well at Microsoft.  When we talked to potential partners it always seemed they were never interested in what Microsoft could do from a technology perspective, but were more interested in what we could give them financially. No one wanted to talk about Windows or Office.  It seemed some of our competitors were angry and they knew how to play the political game.  Microsoft was not there.  In one of my last meeting in Ridgewood, before we moved over to campus under Mark Chestnut one of our VP’s came to review our business.  His name was Sam Jadallah, a long time Microsoft exec.  During a casual moment he spoke of a dinner meeting the other exexs had with Microsoft VP of legal, Bill Neukom.  At dinner Bill had been quite clear.  It is time for Microsoft execs to stat meeting with Senators and Congressmen.  To give to political campaigns and foster powerful relationships.  Sam said that all the VP’s (who were all technical guys) had difficulty grasping this new concept or even desiring to do so.  After the meeting Sam was rushed back to campus where a helicopter was waiting to transport him down to Billg’s Hood Canal compound, for a big executive meeting.  The winds of the DOJ were becoming ever clearer and growing stronger.

The MGS in 1998 was a bit different.  I had been working for Linda Griffin for a year, our group had expanded to include a Notes Compete and Sun Compete Teams, and this internet thing continued to grow.  It was my first trip to New Orléans and it was hot, real hot.  It seems when I talk to people they either hate or love New Orléans.    I have to admit it is my kind of town.  Is it dirty?  Yes.  is it crime ridden?   Yes.  Is the weather unbearable?  Yes.  But the state of Louisiana in general is a place with a very rich history and a whole lot of charachter.   You have Cajun, you have Creole, you have African-Americans, White trash, – pretty much everything.  For those readers outside the US, it is in the South.  But unlike all its neighbors who are usually viewed as the bible belt, very conservative, very Republican, the state of Louisiana has never fallen into a defined box.  Louisiana votes the way it wants to vote and is usually ahead of everyone else.  The political history of the state is a very vibrant one with lots of great characters. The current governor is of Indian origin, Bobby (Piyush) Jindahl who is catholic and Republican.  They also have a congressman of Vietnamese origin, Ahn “Joseph ” Cao.   The food is awesome in New Orléans, as good as anywhere in the United States.  In short it’s muggy, political and a great place to  eat…what more could you ask from a conference?

The conference center in New Orléans is huge.  During the technical sessions I just remember it was along way to walk, no matter where you went.  After all that walking you would build up a  sweat and then get to go outside and walk to your Hotel. oh joy.  During one of the early days I hooked up at the end of the day with a few folks from the Internet Custer Unit (ICU) – Dave Derwin, Chris Tham (Cisco Alliance manger) and a guy named Jonathan (we will call him the wine guy).  We went to a famous restaurant called K-Pauls, home of legendary chef Paul Prudhomme.  The nice thing about traveling especially in those days was you got to eat out at some nice restaurants.  I just remember that everything from the bread to the entre to the dessert was fantastic.  Our wine guy picked a great Pinot Noir from Oregon, Domain Drouhin.  Afterwards we went to a Cigar Bar next door with bottle of Scotch.  As the rain poured down in buckets the old wood doors were flung open and we looked out on the down pour looking at some old hotel with the classic New Orleans iron railing.  It was a very cool surreal setting like you would see in the movie “Angel Heart”.

Bourbon Street was just a sea of Microsoft people and a lot of girls on balconies with beads around their necks.  As far as I know none of those girls were Microsoft employees.  It was visually entertaining.  I can see why Bourbon Street is famous. 

The rest of the conference flew by quickly.  I remember my roommate was a guy from Telesales named Michael Stout.  As usual I never specified a roommate and as usual it always seemed to work out well.  I met a lot of nice people by doing that.  As we got to the last days I do remember the executive Q&A session with Bill Gates.  One of my co-workers in the field, who was based out of Chicago asked Billg a question.  The person’s name was Niel Kane and the question was, “what should we do about Linux?”  Bill responded, “If you can’t beat Linux, you should not have a job”.  It’s easy to idolize Billg, especially when you are at Microsoft.    But I realized then that Bill did not get it.  Working withe ISP’s I knew that many were using Linux for dedicated offerings like Send Mail or basic web hosting.  Bill in his response was looking at things visa vis Windows and the desktop.  In the data center, however Linux was taking hold in a big way.  Windows NT was just not designed for a lot of the things that were needed to provide a reliable internet service.  For one there was just so much stuff in  the Windows OS and for many internet services you wanted a dedicated box just to do one thing well and no more.  No reboots, no memory leaks, no multi-tasking etc..I felt bad for Niel but I am happy he asked the question and maybe for a brief moment I understood the evolving world of technology better than Bill did.

We reached the last night and the big party was underway.  This years entertainment was none other than Huey Lewis and the News.  I was never a big Huey fan but listening to the show it was easy to forget how many hits that the News had.  It was a good show.  When it was over I went down to the standing bars they had throughout the conference center and had a Crown Royal, then another and then another.  Luckily my boss Lida saw my current state and got a taxi to drive me to my Hotel.  Which was a quarter of a mile away. 

In rethinking the event it was different in that it seemed like it should have been exciting, but it was missing something.  There were no huge product releases that year and the industry we had grown so quickly in was changing due the emergence of the internet.  I think what was really happening was the center of the universe had started to move from the desktop to the internet, it was just so early that no one could tell.   But that is how these shifts always occur, they star slowly and then they gain momentum.  Little did we know them momentum it would bring.  That is not to say Microsoft did not get it.  Billg had done his “Pearl Harbor Day” speech and we had incorporated hyperlinks into every product we could.  As much as we were trying to embrace we were still trying to find our place in the evolving world of technology.   I shall save that discussion for another entry.  Good night and good luck.

Hans Hoffmann

January 25. 2010

The competitive landscape was always changing and dynamic and with Microsoft always moving up the food chain and trying to crack the enterprise it was inevitable we would start encroaching on existing companies territories.  It was also likely that some of these companies might innovate.  One of the brightest and certainly most vocal competitors Microsoft faced was SUN Microsystems.  They were led by the ever vocal and brash Scott McNeely.

The history of SUN was interesting.  The name stood for Stanford University Network.  Originally the building complex they were in, housed two other companies Silicon Graphics (SGI) and a company called Cisco.  All three companies can lay claim as Silicon Valley legends. Scott was with a group of techies and when they chose roles he became President because he was a business guy and frankly did not know a whole lot about technology.  Check the archives of “60 Minutes”if you want to verify.  Coincidently he was a Detroit guy like Steve Ballmer.

I was always impressed with SUN as they made hardware, but beyond hardware, they designed the chip (SUN Sparc), the Operating System (SUN OS) and then manufactured the boxes.  This was in contrast to Microsoft which had a philosophy – you either made hardware or software, but you did not do both.  They also had some very smart people who qualify as Tech Legends.  Bill Joy was the CTO and a software guy at a hardware company.  At Berkley he had written a OS called BSD.  A forerunner to Linux and I believe something Linus Torvalds and company learned from, in particular what not to do.  James Gosling a key player in architecting Java and Eric Schmidt, who went on help some startup called Google.

For some of you reading this post who are not as technical you may ask what is Java?  To put it basically it’s a programming language.  So people who wrote applications for a living had the option to choose Java as the language they want to write in.  But why?  Well this is where it gets interesting. For this of you have followed my blog you, if you remember my blog on Novell I discussed their failed effort to unify Unix.  Novell had the right idea, just the wrong approach.  SUN had a different approach.  I probably heard this summarized best at a Microsoft technology event by Corporate VP Paul Flessner.  SUN was following what Microsoft was doing with Windows NT Server and realized  that with the marriage of File and Print services and application services Microsoft had a winning formula for developers.   At the time Unix devs chose whether they wanted to write apps for IBM AIX, SUN Solaris, HP UX, to name just a few.  So SUN came up with the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and said write to the JVM and then it will support and take care of the underlying OS.  So whether you were running Windows, HP UX, AIX Solaris etc..if you wrote to the JVM your app would be supported (in theory).  As Paul said, it was the smart thing to do.  In the dev world the marriage of Java and the JVM is what we refer to as managed code.  You do not have to worry about the underlying OS as much since the JVM handles everything (in theory).

As SUN gained popularity and Java really went crazy in the enterprise another thing took place, the dotcom boom.  Two things really happened in the dotcom bubble for SUN.  The first being that a pivotal player in dotcom was the Telecommunications carriers.  Anyone who followed the stock market at this point realized that the stock valuations globally of Telco’s really went through the roof at this time.  To shed a little light on history here, AT&T Bell Labs created the UNIX operating Systems.  The OS that runs the phone system we are all on today is predominantly UNIX based.  As these carriers built out their networks – the developer problem they had was solved by what SUN was providing with Java.  They also wanted the lowest cost UNIX system, which at the time SUN was lower priced then what other vendors like HP or IBM had to offer.  The second thing that happened was this Telco evolution that was going on extended to all the Dotcom startups.  I spent a lot of time traveling to Silicon Valley in those days and all over the place were the SUN billboards, “Sun Microsystems the . in Dotcom”.  During this period SUN was blowing away it’s quarterly earning’s every quarter.

During this rise to glory it was the first time Microsoft was starting to hear that we were evil.  It was hard to take.  It was not new, but in the past these types of evil jabs were from people in the industry.  These new attacks seemed to resonate out to the general public.  It became common at Microsoft to walk into an office and see a picture of Scott McNeely on the wall being used as a dart board.  As I move forward on my blog I will come back to this area of perception, but these attacks really made a lot of Microsoft employees angry and they hurt.

Microsoft did respond and we came out with our own Java tool called J++ and started showing up at conferences.  I had an opportunity at a Microsoft class once to hear then VP , now President of the Server & Tools Division, Bob Muglia talk about this.  Bob was a short stout man with a high-pitched and squeaky voice.  Bob said that Microsoft went to a conference for Java developers and not only showed up with our own IDE (Integrated Development Environment), but it was the best one at the event.  SUN was quick to recognize what was going on.  If we built our own empire of Java Developers we could start defining and taking ownership of the JVM.  If we were leading the developers on how to write the JVM, well then Sun would be minimize..  Sun Microsystems did what all smart companies do, they filed a lawsuit.

During all this SUN had what they perceived as a big problem with Java.  Make no mistake Java was huge in the industry.  However SUN was not making any money on Java.  They refused to hand it over to the standards bodies (which in my view would have been the smart thing to do).  They also were more clueless about Open Source then Microsoft.  I think they missed the point on this one.  They did conferences for Java, but they really should have built a strong program around the developer community – once you have developers they can write applications to your platform (and others).   They could have created a strong developer brand around Java.  They would have owned the direction of the community. In the end  SUN was so afraid of seeding any control of Java, that they did nothing.    They were also a hardware company and they had a huge hit with software.  Hardware is great for revenue,  you can get really big numbers, because it is expensive to buy, but your margins are not that great.  On the other side software is cheaper and you really need economies of scale to drive big revenue numbers.  However software margins are huge, usually around 90% so Net Profits are great.  The one thing I will say having sold developer tools for a number of years is as developer technologies progress prices usually fall.  Making money on developer tools is not like Windows or Office, average growth is around 11.5%.  SUN really needed to build a home run software application that ran on the JVM that  they then could have market to the Enterprise masses, sadly that was just not in their DNA at the time.

As the dotcom boom died so did SUN Microsystems.  The problem SUN had was that so much revenue was being generated by the dotcom boom that when it went bust all of SUN’s eggs were in one basket.  It was surprising to see how much revenue was being generated for SUN by the telecommunications industry.    Having called on the French based telecom equipment maker Alcatel, I knew that these accounts were large (if memory serves me correctly Alcatel was a $40 million a year account for SUN).  A second thing that occurred  was the rise of Linux.  What was interesting was for all the Open Source Community talk of anything but Microsoft, Linux did not impact Windows, but it killed all the high-end high-priced UNIX OS’s.  I love penguins.  The biggest winner of all with Linux was IBM.  Another story for another blog. 

Sun Microsystems would exist for a long time afterwards, but it never regained the voice it had in the industry .  Most of the really brilliant people have left though a few remain.  They recently completed the process of being acquired by Oracle.  Too bad, they were an exciting company to follow, but in the world of the internet, empires rise and fall faster than ever seen before.  Moving forward it’s only going to get faster.

Good Night and Good Luck,

Hans Hoffmann May 18, 2010