Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz Tweets Resignation In Haiku

CEOs may come and go, but not every one chooses to tweet their departure.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced his resignation via Twitter, becoming the first Fortune 200 head to do so, according to the New York Times.

Schwartz Tweeted from his account, OpenJonathan,

Today's my last day at Sun. I'll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more

(see screenshot below)

The New York Times also notes that during his tenure at Sun, Schwartz as an avid user of social media tools:

Mr. Schwartz has been fond of using the Internet as a soapbox. At Sun, he became the first chief executive of a major company to put up his own blog. Mr. Schwartz also pushed the Securities and Exchange Commission to put blogs on equal footing with press releases and filings when it comes to disclosing critical business matters to investors.

On January 28, Schwartz tweeted out a link to what he said was 'likely my last blog at Sun...' (Read Schwartz's blog entry, 'Where Life Takes Me Next...' here.)

In it, he writes,

Greg Papadopoulos, one of the brightest people I've ever known, once made a very interesting statement - all technology ultimately becomes a fashion item. It was true for timekeeping, and it's definitely true of computing and telecommunications. To that law, I'd like to add a simple corollary: the technology industry only gets more interesting. It's been true my entire life.

Comments

[jsgaetano]

01:27 PM on 02/08/2010

Ran it into ground,
Can't compete in the real world,
All good scams run out.

[VinceTeeter]

12:53 PM on 02/05/2010

A nowhere man leaving a nowhere company to go nowhere.

[faster72i]

11:42 AM on 02/05/2010

i love how he blamed the economy rather than his poor skills at running a business. what an arse... if it could all be blamed on the economy, why didn't oracle go out of business?

[Charlie Crystle]

07:11 PM on 02/04/2010

More ego than sense.

[Bill Moffatt]

04:38 PM on 02/04/2010

Now thats some pretty cool stuff. Way to go Tweet!

Jess
www.web-privacy.cz.tc

[LarryinMiami]

12:43 PM on 02/04/2010

"haiku?" What language is that?

[mc]

12:49 PM on 02/04/2010

Japanese.

[LarryinMiami]

04:31 PM on 02/04/2010

sorry, I was joking............

[SuperBunny]

04:10 PM on 02/04/2010

A Japanese one
It's the form of a poem
Only three lines long

[SamBaby]

01:41 PM on 02/06/2010

Super, Bunny!

[stubb207]

11:40 AM on 02/04/2010

John Charlton,

you obviously either don't work with programmers or you are one and too biased to see that 99.5% of programmers make really bad managers, business decisions, and social conversations. they should sit in an office and do what they do best, drool over there own work.

[GafferTapeLvr]

12:34 PM on 02/04/2010

Stereotype much?

[Tom95134]

12:37 PM on 02/04/2010

Unfortunately, the pay structure of most companies doesn't allow a parallel path for engineers to keep pace with the money/perks that a manager can achieve. This situation almost forces people into jobs that they are not well qualified to fill because of temperament. That is why you get software developers promoted into management positions and then failing to make the correct management decisions.

[falco]

12:45 PM on 02/04/2010

Well said Tom. The "snaz boy" managers sit around, admiring their shoes, getting paid off the backs of the engineers, who, as you stated, have no way to move up and get paid for the work they drool over (it is beautiful).

[Tyrione]

12:56 PM on 02/04/2010

Don't misconstrue Programmer with Engineer. Computer Science is not an Engineering discipline.

The OP was talking about Programmer. You can't even misconstrue Programmers with Computer Science degree holders who themselves are most often not technically diverse in their backgrounds and just learned a programming language for a new job.

I chose both Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science. The OP has a point about most Programmer being horrible for management and decision making that impacts a group of people. I consider myself a Mechanical Engineer with Computer Science who can't stomach most Programmers.

[studmoose]

11:30 AM on 02/04/2010

Since Oracle's takeover...

The SUN has set.

[thewho77]

10:57 AM on 02/04/2010

Oh great! As he leaves he suddenly becomes cool. I wanna work for that cool dude!

[justadood]

11:22 AM on 02/04/2010

I did work for that cool dude....and his iconoclastic predecessor.

No regrets---cool people attract cool subordinates. I worked with a great many cool people at Sun, and miss them all, as well as the fun times we had together....

[Bude]

10:45 AM on 02/04/2010

They're letting the geeks run the business?

[John Charlton]

11:21 AM on 02/04/2010

if the geeks ran things instead of the people who partied through college and took like 3 "hard classes" (business majors) there would be a lot fewer problems in the world.

[rpr]

11:44 AM on 02/04/2010

Gates, Page, Brin, Ellison... clearly those geeks are bad for business.

[Master-T]

12:49 PM on 02/04/2010

As I noted above, this is such a tired stereotype basically perpetuated by those that are intimidated by the intelligence of engineers. Most executives don't understand the first thing about software development.

[Balzac]

10:45 AM on 02/04/2010

Jonathan Schwartz entertained some good ideas and he advanced Sun towards more openness. I think he maybe should have gone GPL on Solaris and made Solaris into a GNU/Linux distro with a specialized kernel with Sun technology and conventions embedded into it.

[TenBagger]

01:45 PM on 02/04/2010

Jonathan Schwartz may have "entertained" some good ideas, but he implemented very few. Instead, he advanced Sun towards an unsustainable business model, a complete loss of focus, and eventual collapse (if not for the good graces of Oracle).

The net result of his reign as CEO from April 2006 until the Oracle acquisition completed was the loss of 1000's of Sun jobs as well as the loss of over 50% of Sun's market cap. For this failure he was rewarded with a sizable golden parachute payment and he gets the opportunity to impress the uninformed with his Haiku.

[Balzac]

01:58 PM on 02/04/2010

I suspect you're wrong, and the problems Schwarz confronted existed before he got there. He also discussed a good idea to help the Solaris code-base, system administrators and developer community come up to speed with the industry, but he was blocked by the old unix bureaucracy. They're stubborn codgers who resent GNU/Linux and that is why they've been languishing in the margins which legacy software vendors are relegated to.

They should have gone forcefully with GPLv3 and they'd have a thriving developer community. But some Unix egos couldn't stand the horns of the GNU casting a shadow on their official Unix legacy. That is why they've suffered.

[Balzac]

02:06 PM on 02/04/2010

Sun was trying to keep up its status as an all-purpose vender of Unix for "big iron", ambitious java agenda, a move into databases, and it was just too much to get the developer community strongly engaged with the gold standard license. The CDDL relegated the Solaris code-base to a bit of an uncertain future. People were left scratching their heads. What is the future of Solaris now?

They should do something more aggressive to gain young developer's interest. I'm not interested in the CDDL as a license. The BlastWave repository need to maintained with more freshness, and it needs to be made official. Solaris Kernel goods should be folded into the Linux kernel code-base and Solaris should become a Linux, or else GPLv3 licensed alternative kernel choice. I'll be interested to see what the next CEO does.

[Whitley2009]

10:31 AM on 02/04/2010

Damn! JavaFX,
Applications wavering,
CEO NO MO!

[alreadybad]

02:55 PM on 02/04/2010

The Sun be a setting now.

[audadvnc]

09:44 AM on 02/04/2010

Scott Mc Nealy's gone
The Stanford groupies also
Ultimate dot-com

[Mazinga]

09:01 AM on 02/04/2010

Oracle shuts down
Everything that wastes money
Now Sun is no fun

[justadood]

11:23 AM on 02/04/2010

I like this one best..... :-))

[Ghazala Khan]

12:14 PM on 02/04/2010

Oracle will only put new life in JAVA, Solaris, mysql and sparc.