He has spent much of his 17-year career at Sun Microsystems trying to get the other technology gurus at the company to follow his lead. As the chief technologist for Sun's system software group, Gingell ran herd on Solaris, Java, and the entire portfolio of servers and development tools. Four months ago he was appointed Sun's chief engineer, and now is responsible for crafting a cohesive strategy as Sun moves from it first-generation systems based on Unix to a second generation oriented around Java.
Gingell talks about his desire to open source Solaris and intermarry it with Linux. He also discusses his focus on other parts of the software stack, especially Java, and why he believes Sun will succeed at a time when Solaris and SPARC are no longer the company's crown jewels. Get an inside look at Sun's strategy in this first instalment of the two-part interview with Gingell. When you're done with Part I, be sure to check out, in which Gingell talks about how he thinks history will repeat itself--to Sun's benefit.
As Sun's chief engineer, what do you do that's different from the other technology chiefs in the company?
My charter is conceptual integrity. Until a couple of months ago, we never had a chief engineer, so this job is different in that respect. Prior to that, I was the chief technologist for the software systems group, which included Solaris, Java, the iPlanet products, and the development tools.
Within Sun, we have a bunch of chiefs primarily because the structure of the company is a little recursive. Every manager of a large staff has their person responsible for representing the technology interests and portfolio of that division. As a software chief technologist, my job was portfolio management, but I did the architectural stuff as well, so I was fairly unique in that regard. Yeah, we do have a lot of chiefs. I've been on a lot of annoying panels where you start to wonder if any one is doing any work with all these chiefs.
What do you mean by "conceptual integrity?"
That's a short description that I use. If I'm successful, then when customers buy a stream of our products and slap them together, they ought to be working. If it happens that they slap them together and they don't work, or they stop working, or work in unexpected ways, that's probably a failure of architecture. At some level, I need to figure out why that happened and make sure we put things in place to put it back together.
My goal in life is to make sure that all the brains in all these buildings [at the various Sun campuses] are effectively employed and create as much as they can. If only one person creates the ideas, you only get one person's worth of ideas. I'd much rather have 30,000 people's worth of ideas. It's always much more powerful, although you have to deal with the arbitration between the conflicting ideas.
Company officials that I've met with in the past have talked about how running Sun was like herding cats, with a lot of diverse interests running in different directions. How much of what you do is focused on keeping the company going in one direction so others can see what the mission is and see what the future is like?
A lot of it is like that. I actually hope that it's never true that the herding cats phenomenon vanishes from Sun. Some of the chaos you're referring to is what makes us interesting and vital, and keeps us from getting locked into a "we're doing this because we did it last week" mentality. That level of chaos, while it's annoying at times, is also fairly powerful because it's the product of having all those brains usefully applied. Where it's a negative is when you have no way of arbitrating the chaos. That goes back to my arbitration role, which I did locally in the software group for many years. It's a new scope expansion to consider doing it for everything all at once.
If I'm successful, we'll more efficiently surf the froth off that chaos, mine it more effectively, and more quickly translate it into "OK, this is where we are going and how that idea over there contributed. Next idea, please."
Where you have this chaos and you see it as a positive, your customers certainly don't necessarily feel the same way. Is there a disconnect?
I haven't personally run into that many customers who are confused about what we're doing. Some of the publications are more confused about what we're doing than some of the customers are, although I certainly don't talk to all of our customers. I've been at Sun for 17 years and I haven't woken up on any day confused about what we're doing or why we're doing it. What is going on is there are a lot of people at Sun who have not been there as long.
There's a lot of primate behaviours in any large organization. The things that everyone works on--those trees that they're staring at a lot--are sometimes confused for the forest. I won't predict that if you talk to a random selection of employees in the hall that they'll all tell you the same thing, but I'll bet most of what they'll tell you can be mapped to the same essential thing.
The way I think of it is that we're moving from our first generation of systems to our second generation of systems. Our first generation of systems was designed to run the Unix application base, and the second generation of systems is designed to run the Java application base. They incorporate the Unix base into it, but that's a definite shift in the structure of what our products are.
