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In his inaugural blog entry for Sun, posted Jun. 28, 2004, Schwartz took the time to explain what a blog was--an iteration that's probably unnecessary in today's context--and explained why he regarded the online journal as an important communication tool. He also pledged to speak his mind, as well as listen to the company's customers, developers, suppliers and stakeholders, among others.
More than three years later, Schwartz has grown to become one of the industry's most-read tech blogger--read by 50,000 people a day--and continues to blog by the same principles today, as he did in June 2004.
In an exclusive interview with ZDNet Asia Wednesday at Sun's Menlo Park campus in California, United States, Schwartz discusses his thought process each time he begins a new post and explains why some CEOs should never blog.
Sun's head honcho also speaks candidly on why the company remains relevant in a Web 2.0 era flooded with user-created content and social networking sites, and has big plans to monetize this segment of the market.
Schwartz also admits and explains why the company was wrong about how it positioned its utility computing model Sun Grid, and how it intends to address the problem.
Q: You first started blogging at Sun on Jun. 28, 2004, and continued to do so when you became Sun's CEO. That made Sun the first--if not, the only--Fortune 500 company with a CEO who blogged. Has this change in role altered the thought process you go through as you write your blogs?
Schwartz: I probably think a lot more carefully now about what I would write. The hardest blog to write is, and you as a journalist would know, if it's the first article you write, you haven't found your voice, you don't really know what the market cares about, you don't really know your own comfort zone.
To me, I feel like I have found a voice that works for me and for the market to which I'm communicating. So I think it has changed quite a bit. And I also understand, and it has only increased in importance over time, how important what I say is to how the company is perceived and how our opportunity is shaped. Because I can quite literally make a statement on my blog, and remember that the Internet is an archive, nothing ever goes away... It would be easy to dip into competitive rhetoric, but of course I would never do that because that would limit our market opportunity. Today's competitor may be tomorrow's partner, look at IBM, that's a great example.
Your primary reason for blogging back in 2004 was to use this as a communication platform. Do you still see it that way?
The number one role of a leader is to communicate. And the number one role of a CEO is to be the chief communicator, to make sure that the people inside the organization know what is important, as well as our partner community and our customers and our shareholders. So I think my blog has only increased in its importance to me, and to Sun, based on its popularity and on how efficiently it allows me to communicate with the world.
It's localized into 11 languages now, from Arabic to Chinese to Japanese to Spanish and French. Those are now all our audience that I can talk to with very high fidelity.
Are there certain issues that are off limits?
Nothing is off limits. And look, to me, it's the same as asking if I would censor a comment. I would no sooner censor my blog than I would a comment. Everything is open. I want to be as transparent and as open to the market opportunity as we can possibly be.
Are there things you would never say in a blog but would in a press release, or the other way round?
I think press releases are Byzantine and antiquated. And I think what matters more is what [Sun's software chief] Rich Green thinks about a change we made to our software strategy, so let us go look at what Rich says on his blog. That, to me, is a much higher fidelity communication instrument than simply a press release that you, as a journalist or a customer, will just throw away and say that's just marketing.
Do you have a guideline, such as RegFD, that you watch out for? Is there like a bible you follow religiously in terms of blogging?
No, RegFD applies just as much to me showing up in a convention center to give a speech or to what I would say to a customer, as what I would articulate in my blog. RegFD just says we have to be fair in how we disclose information and to me, the blog is probably the most fair because it's the most accessible to everybody in the marketplace.
It's still not very common for CEOs, or at least in Asia, to have corporate blogs. How would you suggest CEOs brush away any concerns they may have about blogging, and would you say not all CEOs should blog?
I think the only people who should blog, first and foremost, should care about communicating to the marketplace, and can make the commitment to support that communication over a long period of time. The people who get into trouble blog because somebody tells them it's important, so they write two things and they stop caring about it and then nothing ever happens. And that's just a waste of effort.
If you care about communicating, then you should be a good communicator. And to me blogging is an enormously effective vehicle to communicate. I mean, in a day, I can get 50,000 readers. There's almost no way imaginable I could travel the planet to touch 50,000 people, and yet with a simple blog entry, I can reach out and solicit feedback from that volume of readers. And these readers are Sun's customers, developers and potential investors.
What we're working on now, and we don't have a good answer, is how do we engage--through all the localized translations--the feedback from the marketplace because right now, the comments are made in English only. I would love to get comments from a telco customer who speaks Arabic or a developer who speaks Chinese.
So the localized versions don't have a section for your readers to leave a comment, in a language other than English?
No.
Any chance that might change?
I want it to. We're looking at ways to go do that.
In your latest blog entry, you mentioned Sun's partnership with Google. But you didn't touch on the potential rivalry with Microsoft.
Right.
And with StarOffice, are we going to see something come off from that?
I think we already have. StarOffice is only the commercial-supported version of OpenOffice. OpenOffice has such a vast user base which, by the way, is mostly outside of the United States and in developing nations, in developing economies, in developing companies. So I think the partnership with Google around StarOffice was simply to amplify the commercial viability of that as a solution. We really don't need a lot of help in amplifying the adoption of OpenOffice, in fact, we probably have a better software distribution than Google has. I think that's one of the things that certainly holds very interesting potential for Sun. We've reached so many consumers and so many developers that we can deliver technology to them that creates market opportunities.
Are we going to see a technology or product refresh for StarOffice?
You will absolutely see more coming down the pike. There're lots of opportunities for us to collaborate around how we store documents in the network and how we print those documents. And those are certainly areas we're looking at.
So problems over interoperability with Microsoft products are no longer an issue?
Well, I think it's a problem for Microsoft because with so many people using OpenOffice, that if a Microsoft user wants to send a document that's stored in what's already recognized to be the international document format, which is ODF (Open Document Format), and Microsoft is incompatible, that's just going to limit their market opportunity.
But of course, they have their OOXML (Open XML)...
Sure, but that just hasn't been recognized to be the international standard that ODF has.
I don't suppose you want to comment on the whole debate over OOXML?
I wouldn't really talk about OOXML other than to say I think the world has a standard for document interchange called ODF, and I'm not sure the world needs two standards for which side of the road you drive on. And I don't think we need two standards for document formats, I think one standard is always better. We think ODF is already so well adopted and embraced by governments worldwide because it represents safety to them. They'll never be locked out of access to their information, and that's really the standard by which they're measuring all other proposed standards.
Another of your favorite blog topic is about how the network is the computer. In fact, the phrase was coined by Sun's co-founder John Gage back in 1984, in which he described a distributed computing environment where services were delivered via the network, or the Internet. Would you describe it differently now?
Nope, I talk to John a lot about this. I think this is one of those few statements that only becomes more true every day, and becomes more relevant to people every day. When John made that
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-Fake Jonathan
Posted by fake jonathan on Friday, August 31 2007 06:03 AM