So the Sun Analyst Conference this week generated a lot of interesting material to discuss. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I’m playing catch up big time from being out of the office (for some reason my wifi wouldn’t work with their network, using either my Gentoo or XP partitions) and I got zero sleep on the red eye, so you won’t get too many of them today. I’ll be lucky if I get through half of my email Inbox.
Fortunately Tim Bray has the scoop for you with some thoughts on the conference here. Lots of interesting questions being asked – and we could talk for hours just on the “Should We (the Analysts) Do Blogs, and Can We Charge For Them?” question. You get three guesses what our answer to that is, and the first two…well, you know how it goes.
My favorite two moments of the conference however were these:
1. During Greg Papadopoulos’ (overall Sun CTO) session, he showed off a Sun Ray Thin client that was working off a wifi connection on stage. Nothing too unusual there. But the access point itself was plugged into a UMTS card – presumably Cingular’s service – and that was serving the laptop-like thin-client’s session. Whether its UMTS or EV-DO, the coming mobile computing options have the potential to enable a whole new generation of thin-client technology. I’m not sold on it yet, but I’m definitely watching it closely.
2. Related to the question above, in the CTO Panel, Tim actually took the opportunity to ask the audience of analysts three questions. First, how many of you read blogs? Just about every hand in the room went up. Second, how many of you do so using an aggregator? A lot of hands went up, but not quite everyone. Last, how many of you have your own blogs. I was very surprised at how few hands went up. That is one thing I definitely expect to change by the same time next year.
Anyhow, look for some thoughts on open source and Solaris next. Meantime, I’ve got to get back to my email To Do’s.
