Sun blogs show uncensored public face

On the morning of April 15, as Sun Microsystems Inc. was preparing to announce its quarterly earnings and a major executive management shuffle, the company was hit with a denial of service (DOS) attack that came within four minutes of blocking it from posting the news to the Sun.com Web site on time.

The DOS attack wasn't reported in the press, but you can read a blow-by blow account of it on a new blogging site that Sun has quietly launched over the past few weeks.

"1:30 pm: I'm getting calls from all kinds of people -- VPs, you name it. If we blow this, we're in serious trouble," wrote Will Snow, the director of Internet services engineering who runs the Sun.com Web site.

"Sometimes I think network hardware providers are behind DOS attacks -- I've been hit 3 times, and each one caused me to buy new network gear," he wrote, tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Two months ago, Snow's public comments could theoretically have got him fired under a company policy that made any public comment unsanctioned by the company's legal and marketing departments a sackable offense.

But in an effort to improve its communications with the outside world, Sun has now set up a blogging system that lets any employee create a blog on the Sun.com site. More than just a bold experiment in vanity publishing, Sun sees its Blogs.sun.com Web site as a possible model for a new type of grassroots corporate communication, according to Tim Bray, one of the creators of XML who was hired by Sun earlier this year and has been driving its blogging effort.

The policy restricting public comments was dropped following an April 7 meeting to examine ways in which Sun might improve its collaboration and communication with outside users and developers. In attendance was Sun's president and chief operating officer, Jonathan Schwartz, who days earlier had been promoted to the number two position at the company.

"I think Jonathan is particularly concerned that we not forget our roots as a community-centered company," said Bray, the director of Web technologies at Sun who called the meeting.

Bray and others in the room were wrestling with how a large company like Sun could better communicate with developers and technical users who had little use for the information coming out of the company's marketing department. "The language of marketing is the language of faceless corporations, and most people don't like it," Bray said. "I think the company got a little bit of a case of 'big company' disease. It's hard for a big company to be good at communication."

Soon after the April 7 meeting, Sun was on its way to becoming less of a big, faceless company. Sun executives drafted a new "Policy on Public Discourse" and Snow was enlisted to set up a server to host the Blogs.sun.com site, which would be Sun's unfiltered public face to the outside world.

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