This would make a great April Fools' Day joke

See here. Tom Yager over at InfoWorld says that we should all use Solaris when we can't use Mac OS X. He says that Solaris has all of the bloat of Windows Vista and none of the headaches associated with ease of use, and that's what makes it a great choice for people who aren't quite Mac people but don't want to be assimilated by Microsoft. Here's the best quote: "Solaris and OS X are both Unix, and if that's not enough, know that PowerBook, MacBook, and MacBook Pro are practically de facto choices among Sun's engineers." So if you're not sold on Solaris, the fact that Sun's engineers use it will seal the deal for sure.

Yes, I know what you're thinking. It doesn't make any sense to me either. And honestly, I'm kind of wondering whether Steve paid to have the article planted. He loves to fuck with the enterprise people.

"You're not going to believe this, but we're giving away servers now too."

Peter "you don't always have to be right" Burrows over at Business Week has hit another grand slam with his newest article about Jonathan Schwartz and Sun Microsystems. The best quote actually comes at the end of the article when Jim Zemlin at the Linux Foundation talks about Sun's recent moves: "It's like back in high school, when I'd throw these big parties and I'd think I was so cool, only no one would come." Which actually says a lot about both Jonathan and Jim when you think about it. Anyway, my question for Schwartz is this: How the fuck are you supposed to make money when you just give everything away? Peter Burrows seems to think that we're living in some new kind of economy where you don't really have to sell anything to make any money. In other words, if you keep throwing free software to the crowd and jumping and dancing around shiny servers long enough, good things are bound to happen. Um, yeah.

Pete, I want you to do something for me, bro. Just humor me, okay? Surf on over to Google and search for "google servers." Then take a good look at those pictures. See how Google is duck-taping hard drives onto motherboards? See how they're using velcro to strap the motherboards to the racks? Those are Google's servers, dude. Those are what power the world's biggest search engine. Google does that to save money and make components hot-swappable. I'm not sure, but it might have something to do with their stock price these days. So, yeah. Not sure where that leaves Sun, especially when you consider that hundreds of companies are now building servers Google-style.

When it comes to Sun's deal with the devil, the cure really is worse than the disease

Years from now people will look back at Sun Microsystems and say, Larry, what was the one event that fucked that poor little company once and for all? And I'll say, well, it happened on September 12, 2007 when Sun sold its soul to the devil. Captain Jonathan Schwartz was tripping on shrooms and decided to start shipping systems with Windows. He steered his ship into a pirate harbor teeming with lowlifes like the notorious and infamous Shit for Brains. And the rest, as they say, is history. Mermaids peed on the wreckage, etc.

Or, to put it another way, Jonathan Schwartz thinks he can fix Sun's identity crisis by getting a lobotomy. And it's stupid enough to work. At least for a little while, until the doctors come out and say, well, the operation was a success, but the patient died.

Cheerio, chap.

Jonathan Schwartz in analogies

His face is a perfect oval, like a circle that's had its two sides gently compressed by a ThighMaster. His thoughts tumble in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free. He speaks with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it. He has a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up. He grows on Sun like he is a colony of E. Coli, and Sun is room-temperature Canadian beef. He's about to fall 12 stories and hit the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup. His mind is like a steel trap, only one that has been left out so long it has rusted shut. He's as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that is actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

And he's about as stupid as the high school students who wrote these dumb analogies. I like our public education system almost as much as I like Sun Microsystems. Schwartz, what the fuck are you thinking? Oh, wait. That's right. You're not. You're like a turd that was accidently dropped into a cup of steaming JAVA. Or something.

If Sun was a ship, it would look a little like this

The best part is that the captains won't even acknowledge the problem. According to them, it's normal for the ship to take on water and lose cargo and start sinking. Full speed ahead, right Schwartz? I mean, you've only made about 3,000 people walk the plank so far, and your CFO Michael Lehman will only say that "we have to continue lowering our cost structure." See here. Listen, Schwartz. Could Michael say "Shit" even if his mouth was full of it? Because if he can't, and he won't, and he wouldn't even consider saying the word, maybe it's time to make him walk the plank. I dunno. Just seems like you'd want to get rid of the people ripping holes in the hull.

Oh, and another thing. While you've been busy trying to bail out the boat, the open source pirates have made off with all your stuff. Open Office, Solaris, everything Java, etc. It's all gone, bro. You gave away the crown jewels. Which actually raises the question: Is it even worth saving the boat at all? I mean, if there's nothing onboard except a bunch of crappy servers with RISC processors, maybe you should just abandon ship. Or did this dude just take the last lifeboat?