Now, if they decide that’s not in their best interest, that’s fine, but if they would like developer mindshare (read: free debugging) on what could be a new standard, they need to get it into more open source OSs, and *BSDs are not going to be enough…

One word of caution, a company that moves fast has it’s benefits and disadvantages for its employees. The main disadvantage for its employees is that people can easily get left behind when the company moves into a new direction or wishes to leave a certain market. During my 5 years at Intel, I saw several reorgs and changes in direction as Intel reinvented itself. While I believe Intel was better off as a result of these changes, not everybody at Intel benefited from these changes as business units were eliminated, sold-off or absorbed into other business units. Intel did a decent job of trying to relocate people to on-going business concerns, but if you lacked the skill set for the new business unit there was little they could do.

For a company that moves slowly, employees can usually see these changes coming and find other opportunities in the same company or another company. However, a company that moves quickly is much more likely to catch its employees unprepared for the change.

I, too, am delighted with Sun culture as I find it so far – there seem to be a lot of very happy people there who know what they’re doing, but are open to new perspectives as well. It’s a fascinating new “country” to explore.