Yup, they’re all over the damn map at Sun these days. Big supercomputer coming tomorrow. Will rank near top of the Top 500 list. When I called My Little Pony to ask him why they’re building this incredibly expensive one-off machine at a time when the company is fighting for its survival, he launched into a rambling lecture about the future of cloud computing and the open-source stack and the endless possibilities to leverage synergies and deliver a complete solution to meet customer demand in response to real customer needs while also providing a greener solution that uses less power and requires less cooling thereby delivering a lower total cost of ownership and also there’s the incredible power of software to free customers from vendor lock-in and deliver new solutions that harness the creativity of the really great engineers at Sun like Andy Bechtolsheim who basically has freedom to explore whatever he wants and just come up with great ideas …

At that point I put down the phone and went to the bathroom. When I came back Jonathan was still talking. Amazing.

MLP hasn’t blogged about this yet but our guys on the inside say he’s going to announce it very soon. This is totally hush-hush, but trust me, this is going to be friggin huge news in the Valley and it is absolutely going to change the way people view Sun and think of Sun and just totally give Sun a huge boost of confidence and a whole new image in the marketplace. Ready? Here goes. Starting next week, Sun is going to announce that it is switching from Starbucks to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters brand as the official coffee brand in all of Sun’s cafeterias and mini-kitchens. MLP is working on a five-thousand-word blog post to explain it all to customers and Sun employees alike, making sure everyone is informed immediately of every important move that Sun ever makes. From the leaked blog post which MLP’s PR guys are still revising for him:

I know this seems like a bold, audacious — dare I say risky? — move, especially at a time like this when we as a company are faced with so many enormous challenges and opportunities and hurdles. We are, obviously, at a historic inflection point that approaches in significance some of the other very historic inflection points in the storied, historic history of this great, historic company. Do we still dare to dream? Do we still dare to change? I say we don’t dare to not dream. And we can’t dare to not change. Otherwise we start looking like some scared, desperate, terrified company that has totally lost its way and spent years in a death spiral and is desperately clutching at any random publicity stunt that it thinks will improve its image, and that is just not who we are or what we are all about. After the change, will we still be the same company? Of course we will. Except that in many ways — big, important, fundamental, audacious, brazen, bold ways — we will not the same company anymore. Will we still have the same focus, the same drive, the same determination to succeed? Of course we will, except that all of those things will be different, and they will be redirecting and changing, because we are, indeed, as we all know, in an industry that thrives on change and exists in a state of constant flux, and we too thrive on responding to that change and feeding the protean beast that is ever hungry for new ideas and new challenges and is totally intolerant of standing still and stasis and (still not wordy enough, Ed). Also, the new coffee is going to cost money. A quarter a cup. Honor system until we can finish coding up an automated system with a Java application running on a local SPARCserver in each coffee-dispensing location, all networked so that we can share data among all of Sun’s locations. Three to six months is the estimate from IT so bear with us. Also, please disregard those rumors that the Sun board is interviewing possible replacements for me. Not true. Nobody in their right mind wants this job. Neither does Scott. That is all.

UPDATE: Photo above is by James Duncan Davidson. See his page here. FSJ regrets not giving credit originally.

More big moves from the world’s greatest CEO. Sun is changing its stock ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA. Maybe you’d like to see some of the deep reasoning and agonizing philosophical debates that took place before Sun could arrive at this momentous, world-changing, gut-wrenching, all-important decision. Jonathan Schwartz explains it all here. Best part is the comments. Make sure you scroll down and check them out. For example, this one:

Jonathan, this is one more indication the board needs to look for someone with REAL ideas to lead a once great company. You’re all driving wonderful technology innovative and real engineers designed in the ground. You’re just a marketing weenie.

As pointed out here, ponyboy kind of jumped the gun when he announced last week that we’d be using ZFS in Leopard. In case you’re wondering, yes, this is what happens when you make a deal with Apple and then double-cross us by announcing it before we say you can. In case you feel like a good laugh at MLP’s expense, see our classic tribute video here.

This My Little Pony tribute video came in from a reader who found it on YouTube. Reader says it was created by the Free Software Foundation as a way to say “thank you” to Jonathan for giving away all of Sun’s IP, and helping to create a new utopian world of sunshine and ice cream and pretty pink operating systems for all boys and girls to use however they’d like.