Dear Sun, Please Shut Up

One of my favorite movies of all time is Office Space. In particular I think John McGinley is brilliant as one of the two Bob consultants. One of my favorite lines of his is when he's interviewing Michael Bolton (David Herman) and says "I am. I'm a Michael Bolton fan!"

I'm that way about Sun - I'm a Sun fan. I think they have done so much great stuff over the last few years in terms of open source. They are a totally remade company, and it's really awesome.

But I have to say, it's getting pretty damned annoying and depressing that some of their top dudes (and yes, they are all dudes) frequently let the downright dumbest things leave their lips. I blogged about an earlier instance of this that occurred during their analyst call right after they announced plans to acquire MySQL. At least Schwartz and Green did better on the do-over call that followed the official closing of the MySQL deal, which took place just 6 weeks later (well done!).

Now, it seems, their VP of Java Marketing has caught the disease, splurting out in geeky exuberation that he just can't wait to port JVM to Apple's iPhone and iPod touch. Problem is, as I read in el reg, there's this little thing called the Apple End User License Agreement that explicitly forbids it.

As the article makes painfully clear, it would be one thing if Klien had said something innocuous like "we would love to take advantage of the newly-released SDK to port JVM to these innovative devices," or something like that. But, oh nooo. Instead, he dove head first into the pile of manure, saying that he and his team (any of them still have a job, I wonder?) had spent the past 24 hours "furiously looking through" the Apple documentation. This caused el reg to wonder out loud if any of them can read (LMAO).

Walks like a trend, talks like a trend, must be a trend. Sun, if not for your own sake, then for the sake of those of us who are rooting and sticking up for you, please put some stricter corporate marketing/communications policies in place.