Objective #1: Developer recruitment…
Reading through the blog of Suns Jonathan Schwartz explaining the recent business strategy of his company, I see a few things to agree with, especially regarding the need to make developers merrily use Sun software and services, and I definitely support this notion as, looking at tools like NetBeans,Glassfish, OpenSolaris, MySQL and a bunch of others, I dare to say Sun at least in terms of actively maintained, community-adopted projects is one of the biggest commercial forces behind open source software these days. From this point of view, “developer recruitment” seems a sane approach…
But I also have to agree with one of the comments in there: Fix marketing. And, eventually more important: Line things up to have a homogenous, meaningful overall strategy. My most impressive experience about this is just a few months old by now, seeing the release of JavaFX happen: A shiny and interesting new technology, just waiting to be used, waiting for something to be done with it. Unfortunately – not for me at this moment: At this time I just had installed my notebook to use OpenSolaris as my only everyday working operating system, be that just for the sake of trying out whether this approach is possible. And, unfortunately as well, JavaFX in its first release didn’t provide support for either OpenSolaris or Linux. So, what on earth…? Having a shiny new technology (JavaFX) aimed at developers to adopt and use it, having a great operating system waiting for developers to adopt it, and still driving eventual adopters of both technologies away by releasing a new development tool (JavaFX) without supporting the other product even though coming from the same house? At least to me this doesn’t seem to be a proof of a good overall product strategy – from this point of view, OpenSolaris support for JavaFX should have been there from day one. So, I just hope that Sun right now with this “new focus” is likely to avoid things like this in near future…