Corporate bloggings

An interesting interview with Sun’s chief information officer Bill Vass, about his experiences as the CIO of one of the world’s best-known high-tech company. Amongst others, Vass talks about corporate blogging and brings some nice to read internal stories.

For example, he said Sun president Jonathan Schwartz — who keeps a public blog — was frustrated when April Fool’s day came around, because he couldn’t use his blog to play a practical joke.

Another nice story is when Vass received a mysterious note about a major system that had been disabled and had stopped production on a hardware chip.
Although Vass had no knowledge of this, he soon discovered the system in question was in fact the desktop machine of an engineer who had recently left the company. The desktop had been reformatted following his departure, cutting off 600 users who had over the last three years depended on it for network services.

Hey, and I thought one only has to deal with this sh** in small businesses 😀

Further on, I particularly liked Vass explaining how Sun test drives their own products. Vass said Sun chief executive Scott McNealy described this process as “flying in our own airplane”. Makes me think of the A380 documentaries we get to see a lot nowadays :). At least it sounds better than Microsoft’s “eat your own dog food”.

If you care about, some interesting comments follow up this article on slashdot. And if you didn’t know Jonathan Schwartz yet, you can download a nice movie (35MB, Quicktime) where he presents project Looking Glass, Sun’s 3D desktop.