As I referenced in my prior entry, I'm reviewing Sun's three major strategic imperatives, and our progress going in to next fiscal year. Our strategic imperatives, in order, are:

1. Technology Adoption
2. Commercial Innovation
3. Efficiently Connecting 1. and 2.

This entry focuses on the second, Commercial Innovation, and reviews our core revenue products, services and strategies.

By now, you understand Sun's approach to growing the market - driving adoption of key technologies drives Sun's addressable market. Once you're using one of our fundamental technologies, Sun's innovations focused on those technologies are relevant to you. The beauty of free distribution is you don't have to pick customers, they pick you.

Three very …

Wikipedia is one of the world's most visited web sites (8th in the top 10, in fact), delivering an enormous breadth of content to an audience as vast as the internet.

But Wikipedia's evolved to become more than an on-line encyclopedia: they've become one of the world's largest search engines, they're a global source of real-time news, alongisde educational, political and health related content - and one of the world's most valuable brands and media properties.

Wikipedia's also a great example of a "redshift" application: a segment of the market that's growing faster than the technology industry's capacity to innovate. Technology companies have to pay special attention to such …

A compilation of today's news of interest:

The bursting of the internet bubble was good for the computer industry.

Many of us didn't like the medicine, but I can't remember a single customer upset at the idea of paying $20,000 for computing infrastructure that used to cost them $100,000. The price compression came from open source software, and a move toward general purpose servers, and resulted in companies formerly making 65% gross profit on products (Sun among them) facing a new reality.

But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Since then, Sun's built the biggest open source software business around (see this report for details), from platform software to application infrastructure (even a …

UPDATE at bottom.

I just wanted to extend my congratulations to the team at Greenplum, and our joint customers at Fox Interactive Media - the folks behind MySpace, Photobucket, IGN, FOXSports.com, and a whole series of web properties that together represent one of the single largest audiences on the web.

All three of us announced today that Fox is running a massive production data warehouse built atop Greenplum's data warehousing software on Sun's Solaris/ZFS based OpenStorage platforms (a sea of Thumpers, to be specific). That is to say, open source software is at the core of one of the world's largest - and most affordable - data warehouses.

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