Every year, I go to JavaOne. Every year, I’m ashamed, embarrassed, and apologetic about Sun’s message. Don’t get me wrong, I like Sun. I really truly honestly do. They have a whole lot of clever people, who can do awesome clever cool things. Sun however is much like King Midas, with shit instead of gold. They have an uncanny knack of hoisting aloft every little turd they find in the bowl, holding it up to the light and screaming gleefully that they have just discovered the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Edited the blog here.
When viewing things from a distance, its easy to assume that they just make dozens of mistakes all over the place, but really, when you stop to think about it, it’s not that many. In fact, I think I’ve identified a good selection that when addressed, would surely result in the success and admiration that Sun so richly deserves.
1. The headless chicken business model is not a recipe for success. Whereas most sane companies evaluate a marketplace, considering such mysterious factors as relevance, business problems, use cases, adoption rates, target audiences, and suchlike, Sun decides that all that stuff is a bunch of smoke and mirrors, and that the only way to financial success is to run around like a headless chicken, plop little turd nuggets, and hope some kind passerby sees a Jesus in the shape of said turds and offers to buy it for some amount of money.
2. What the fuck does Tim Bray do? Now, I know he invented XML (gee, thanks Timmy, what a brilliant fucking idea THAT turned out to be) and all, but what on earth does he actually do now? All I see is swathes of inane posts, a silly hat, and ludicrous navel gazing proclamations such as ‘javascript is ubiquitous’ and other such earth shatteringly obvious observations. Maybe he’s supposed to be an evangelist of some sort? What exactly is he trying to convince us Java hordes to do, and to what purpose? Sun, you’re not Google, they have enough money (for now) to hire pointlessly and for bragging rights, you don’t.
3. Nibble on the wrong penis. Sure, all companies have to at some point suck nasty nether bits. Sun though excels in finding the exact wrong crowd and proceed to spend untold amounts of effort towards appeasing this random crowd. Did we REALLY need an open source Java? How many external contributors are there now? All that did is land you in trouble with the Apache turdburglars because now you want to pretend to be all OSSy and yet still make money. Honestly, who in their right mind would try to sell to a bunch of gay python lovers who either have no money or have no intention of spending any?
4. Ponytails look stupid on grown men. Seriously? The CEO has a ponytail and wears tweed jackets? What exactly is the message here, that he’s a refugee from the early 70s? I think that the community will gladly rustle up $2000 as a reward for anyone who managed to lop the damn thing off. Not for any particularly reason, but as a sensible outlet for the anger we feel at all the ways in which Sun pulls a self-Cheney every other day; shooting itself in the face for the comedic effect, apparently.
5. JavaFX is a useless pile of steaming monkeyshit. It’s been over a year now, and the best JavaFX minds assure me it’s nowhere near useful, ready, or relevant yet. Sure, it was a cute project, some random guy (Chris Oliver, now nicknamed olo behind his back, apparently, presumably not for the size of his ass, but for jlo’s other qualities) comes up with a cute trick. This does not a product make. Whats amazing is how the definition of JavaFX varied depending on which Sun monkey you’re talking to. It’s either a new RIA platform, a deployment mechanism, a scripting language, or a neat way for graphics designers to develop apps (and we know how many graphics designers can code, such a huge untapped market that must be). Needless to say, I cant do anything with it like write a basic useful app thats not some graphics demo toy penistugger. Even worse, competent swing people are being relocated to this clusterfuck, so not only is time and effort wasted, but there’s actual damage being done elsewhere too.
6. People with small orifices shouldnt annoy people with big dildos. Sun somehow seems to go out of its way to piss off anyone it ever deals with. This is fine when you’re dealing with a bunch of asshat powerless developers, but less fine when you’re dealing with vindictive incompetent shitbags like Oracle and IBM. Sadly for you Sun those guys are doing well, and sadly for them they’re heavily invested in Java. You need to do a fuck of a lot more sucking up, and an awful lot less of pretending you’re the dude with the big dildo.
