Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, just dropped me off at the lobby of building 10. So, I'm sitting on the floor near a power outlet and am blogging my experiences.

What an enjoyable guy! We walked across the street to a Togos sandwich shop. Little-known trivia, Togos was started by a couple of San Jose State University students. I have lots of great memories of eating in Togos over the years (there was one across the street from our high school — I graduated in 1983).

Anyway, at one point we were having such an engaged conversation I had to remind myself that he runs a company with 37,000 employees and billions in revenues. We instantly were talking like long-lost friends.

There was a serious tone to our lunch, though, we talked a lot about the business difficulties facing Sun Microsystems. They are about to layoff thousands of people.

One thing I look for in leaders, though, is willingness to take the worst of times in stride with a clear eye on what comes next. Jonathan exceeded all my ideas of what a leader should do. And he has great pride in Sun, too, and says that the business is starting to turn around.

For one, Sun is going to encourage all the laid off workers to continue to blog — on Sun's dime. Now, I can imagine the kind of vitriol and crud that'll get posted by workers who've just lost their jobs. That takes real corporate bravery and my hat is off to him. One good thing about this? It'll make it possible for new employers to get in touch with laid off workers. There's a lot of companies that are hungry for workers right now.

At one point I asked him about the Business Week cover I saw (Marissa Mayer at Google was staring at both of us, being crowned by BusinessWeek as queen of innovators) and said "what innovations is Sun doing?" Later I asked him if there's something that Sun and Microsoft could innovate together on?

He told me about some of the innovations that Sun has been working on in the past few years. He's in the midst of a large-scale corporate upheaval and rebuilding.

One of the things he's proudest of is Sun's engineers found a way to dramatically lower the power consumption of their servers. How did they do that? By getting rid of things that Web servers don't need — and by slowing down the chip which didn't hurt Web performance, since most of what Web sites need is high throughput, not high turnaround time (he told me that I really care if 1,000 people can all download my blog at the same time, not that any one of those getting it a microsecond faster). He told me that they found that customers of the size of Ebay weren't using much floating point performance on its datacenters. So they removed that functionality, and other stuff. That saves power. Good for the environment, good for his customer's bottom lines, and good for Sun too.

He's deeply concerned about the amount of power that Internet sites are using. He says that for many Internet companies it's already one of their top three costs. Reduce power and heat on servers and you can save companies like Google or Ebay or, even, WordPress, a lot of money.

How could Microsoft and Sun innovate together? That's a tough one cause our businesses are aimed at different places at the moment, but we brainstormed a few places and I'm sure we'll get something going offline. The fact that we were even talking about working together demonstrates that it's a new world and that the only constant in the business world is change.

He's most passionate about the growth of content around the world. Talked about how a friend of his showed him the popularity of Indian Cricket games world-wide, something that hasn't caught on here in Silicon Valley, but has up to a billion people interested around the world. That kind of content will be delivered over the Internet, which means more business opportunities for Sun. He sees the effect that blogs, Wikis, MySpace, podcasting, and video and videoblogging are having on the growth of the Internet too and is looking for ways that Sun could help those networks grow and thrive.

Why invite me over for lunch? Cause he is seeing the deep effect that blogging is having on his company (it's helping recruitment at Sun too, even in the face of layoffs) and wanted to meet me and get to know me a little better. That's very flattering, but I too was trying to learn something about Sun that hadn't been reported already.

One thing I found out? That he's a staunch proponent of working at home. At Sun they found that people who work at home are far less likely to leave Sun than employees that have to come into the office. He sees that as a competitive advantage and doesn't understand why some companies force their employees to come into the office.

He also went into great detail with me about why Sun is in the position of having to lay people off. I found that to be fascinating behavior on the behalf of a CEO meeting with an employee of one of his fiercest competitors. He's bummed out by having to lay people off which seems trite to say when you talk about a CEO that isn't seeing his own job threatened, but he told me he grew up in a poor family and wants to put Sun into a position so it can hire back all those workers.

He won me over. I've met a few CEOs over the years and a lot of them just want to tell me their point of view. Jonathan was noticeably different: he asked ME questions about how I looked at the world. He was curious, personable, someone I could see drinking a lot of beer with and still remaining friends with. And that's my point of view from the floor of Sun Microsystems' corporate headquarters.

Next time Jonathan, you gotta come up to Microsoft and I'll buy lunch and let's take the relationship further.

Neowin is reporting that Windows Vista is now available for public download. Go get it!

Yeah, Pete Abilla, I've been writing about Microsoft about 50% of the time lately. (He analyzed my blog). Sorry about that. I'll try to make the percentage less, but there's just a lot of stuff coming through my email streams about Microsoft lately.

Update: Microsoft has a "Get Ready" page that might prove useful and CNET has an article.

I see that Dave Winer and Seth Godin and Mark Ramsey are talking about the name "podcasting" again.

That's a great name! And I haven't heard anyone at Microsoft complain about it in more than eight months. Even before that I only heard one or two arguments like the one Mark is putting out, but one thing at Microsoft that I've noticed is that once someone makes a good case and a consensus is formed we don't go back and reargue stuff like this. Podcasting has stuck. No use debating that anymore.

Did you know we have a podcasting email alias internally at Microsoft? Yeah

We're slow to react to podcasting as a trend, yes. Shame on us for that. But don't believe it's because of the name. It's not (Dave claimed that's why we haven't done a lot of podcasting stuff yet). 

So, why hasn't podcasting taken off more yet? Easy! It's hard to discover new ones (you gotta listen to them).

You go to Podtech.net or Podshow.com and poke around. You have to download a file before you can listen. In that time you probably got bored and started watching Lost again. Or, even if you download something like "Dawn and Drew" you find out that they aren't interesting to you, and think all podcasts are sex talk.  If you're over at Podtech you might get lucky and hit one of their great interviews, but a lot of their stuff is commercial and not that interesting.

Now, don't get me wrong. There are some awesome podcasts out there. I like TWiT, for instance. And, generally anything that Doug Kaye does. And most of the PodTech.net stuff is worth listening to too. Of course there's the Gillmor Gang. 

Interesting that all of those are on the top podcast readout on Share Your OPML. Speaking of which, have you uploaded your OPML yet? Why not? 

This is an important one to pay attention to. And that's no Microsoft hype.

We're expecting the U.S. House of Representitives will vote on the Markey-Boucher-Eschoo-Inslee network neutrality amendment tomorrow or Thursday.

I strongly support this amendment. It is gonna really be nasty if bandwidth companies can block or charge different rates to different internet players. It looks like Cox is blocking Craig's List, for instance. This is the kind of stuff we should expect if Network Neutrality isn't ensured.

Here's stories about Network Neutrality on Technorati and on Google News.

It's time to call your representative and let your wishes be heard.

What do you think? 

Michael Parekh writes an interesting, albeit NOT politically correct, post on the decisions facing Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo and any other tech company that wants to do business in China).  Well worth reading. What do you think? What would you do if you were Bill Gates or Larry and Sergey?

For the past few days, in between "getting back in the office" meetings and some video shoots, I've been dealing with the mess that is my email. I still have 470 emails to go. Sorry for not getting back to you. 

Anyway, I've triaged them into separate folders and now am turning on ClearContext and am trying to get them worked down.

Here's my folders, which might get you some insight into the kinds of emails that I'm getting.

BBQ: (7 requests to attend my BBQ on July 2)
Blog News (179 things emailed to me to put on my blog — I only can get around to five or 10 a day lately, so this shows the liklihood that something that gets emailed to me will get here).
Channel 9 (52 items, mostly about videos coming up, a lot of asking what's up with existing videos, I'm way behind, also, anyone asking for a Channel 9 guy, those are being sent out)
Condolences (114 emails saying sorry about my mom. Richard Edelman donated $500 to the National Park Service in my mom's memory. That was very nice, thanks.)
Events (39 emails about various events that are coming up, lots of speaking requests that I have to mostly turn down).
Interviews (15 requests for interviews. Now I know why we have a PR team! Heheh.)
Microsoft Internal Requests (teams want various things, mostly want feedback on new stuff, there are so many new things coming soon that I can no longer keep track of all of them).
Requests (29 general requests for me to track down info or help with a problem.)
Tech Support (14 emails asking for tech support with a Microsoft product or service that I need to figure out who to email to).

Whew, lots of emails. I'm very tempted to select all and delete. But I won't. It might take me a while to get back to these, though. While I typed this three more emails came in.

How do you deal with email when you come back from vacation? Anyone come back and have more than 1,000 waiting (which is what would have happened if I hadn't done some email work when I was out of the office with my mom in Montana)? 

Anyone have any good tips? Yeah, I'm using ClearContext too, but it only helps you get started, it doesn't answer the email for you.

By the way, thankfully I have Outlook 2007. There's something about using it that makes dealing with email a lot faster. I'm still trying to figure it out, but whenever I'm back on Outlook 2003 I feel slow. For one thing the search rocks. For another the UI is a lot nicer to use. But maybe that's just me. Anyone else noticing the same thing? 

Check out Netcraft's June 2006 Web Server Survey. Key things? Dramatic increase in Internet size. Oh, and Windows gained large share numbers too. Why? Blogs, the report says.

Key quotes?

"The Internet experienced its strongest site growth ever last month, powered by a surge in blogs and free Web sites."

"Microsoft continues to gain share in the web server market, chipping away at Apache's commanding lead. The number of hostnames on Windows servers grew by 4.5 million, giving Microsoft 29.7% market share, a gain of 4.25% for the month. Apache had a decline of 429K hostnames, and loses 3.5% to 61.25%."

Who knew that blogs would change marketshare numbers?

Bing: Dave Winer did. He told me they would someday.

I just spent an hour with the Sharepoint 2007 team and they've added blogging, Edit This Page, RSS, and Wikis to Sharepoint (very well, I might add). At the end of the video I had them thank Dave Winer (he was the first to show me EditThisPage and RSS, both of which were featuers in UserLand's Manila, which I used, and later joined the company to sell) and Ward Cunningham (inventor of the Wiki).

Those two guys have changed the world.

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, blogs about the difficulty of getting people to see their new technology and programs.

I feel his pain.

When I was in Montana I met people who hadn't heard of blogs, podcasts, or Second Life (or even Windows Vista). You know, normal people. People who have other things to care about than what is on TechMeme.

Heck, today I spoke to a group of PR professionals and only 2 out of the 40 or so that were there watched TechMeme (they really should, since they are PR pros in the tech world).

So, if you were talking to Jonathan what ideas would you give him for reaching the unreachable masses?

Disclaimer: the other day Jonathan invited me to have lunch with him (thanks to Tim Bray). That'll happen soon. He's the first CEO of a major tech company to invite me to lunch. I am very honored and hope to learn a lot from one of the few CEOs who blog.

My tip? I'll ask him why he doesn't do a video blog ala a Channel 9. So many people come up to me and tell me Channel 9 changed how they viewed Microsoft that I know there's some real power in amateur, shaky-cam video.

I wonder if that team he spoke with (a Fortune 100 tech team) knew about Windows Communication Foundation or Windows Presentation Foundation, or what's in the latest Sharepoint, or what Microsoft Dynamics does? 

In the Yankee Group's annual server reliability survey (not sponsored by Microsoft) they found that Windows 2003 Server led the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20% more annual uptime.

Guess what's built starting with Windows 2003 Server's code base? That's right, Windows Vista.

If I were in Bill Gates' office right now wondering how I'd deal with Google, one of my first proposals would be to take a deep look at why Technorati is succeeding in the marketplace on Google's home turf: search.

Technorati has taken quite a bit of my search time away from Google and Live.com.

Why is that? Well, Google has the same disease that Microsoft has: it can't see small things.

Blog search is a small thing.

Not enough users to get product managers at Microsoft or Google excited. Instead they look at the big audiences and the big money.

I can just hear Eric Schmidt at Google telling his troops: "let's go after Microsoft, cause that's where the money and users are."

And I can hear Bill Gates at our offices telling us "let's go after Search, cause that's where the money and the users are."

In the meantime Technorati is sticking its tongue out at both of us saying "you suckers, you can't see the small things and the small things are important."

Technorati is a proof case that Google is vulnerable on search.

Now, it's up to us to start seeing the small things. Give Dave Sifry a call. He'll show the way. Tom Foremski of ZDNet sees it.