malvasia bianca

I had the pleasure of going to the StreamStar launch in New York. In a private jet, no less; Sun execs occasionally take them, Fowler was using one to get to the launch, and the rest of us got to tag along.

Which was fun. Not a transcendent experience or anything: the food was so-so, there wasn’t any place to put my backpack. And I was surprised that there wasn’t any internet access: I thought the technology for that sort of thing was available, and it seems like exactly the sort of thing executives would appreciate to make more effective use of the hours in the air. Dunno. But it was very nice to be able to show up just a few minutes before the plane was scheduled to leave, and to not have to go through security: it eliminates all sorts of waste and uncertainty. If I’d been taking a commercial flight, I probably would have had to go a day earlier, and otherwise I would have had to get up at an ungodly hour; as it was, the timing was quite civilized.

What was not so great was waking up that morning with a sore throat, and having it turn into a quite nasty cold by the end of the day. I ended up lasting through about 45 minutes of the launch party; nice to see a StreamStar system set up and working in a hotel (never thought I’d see that), but I wish I’d been able to enjoy more of it. We had something interesting planned the next day which I had to bow out of, too.

Fortunately, the cold went away about as fast as it arrived: I was feeling much better by the end of the flight home. Which was my favorite part of the whole experience, as it turned out: I got to hear Fowler talk about several really amazing products we have in development. I’d been feeling a little out of touch for a while; there’s obviously been a lot going on that I’ve been missing. To the extent that I’m now starting to think that I want to hang out at Sun for the indefinite future just to see how this comeback plays out. We have a stream of products (not least of which is StreamStar itself) coming out that nobody has seen before; they won’t all stick, but I bet some of them will, and I bet some of them will create markets that nobody has envisioned.

I need to start figuring out what’s happening on the software side, too…