Sun's Jonathan Schwartz takes up the fireside chat habit

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO and president, has taken up videoblogging. Like FDR before him he's seized the airwaves to dispense wisdom in the face of economic uproar. Of course, he does kicks it off with "joining the chorus of those worried about the global economy," but since when do they do things the easy way over at Sun?

The inaugural video, slated to be the first of four, lays out Sun's strategy for pressing forth with open source as a strategy, philosophy, and business advantage. He's quite confident of getting the company, which has $3 billion in cash, though these days: "I'm not worried about the future; I'm focused on its arrival date."

With that happy thought, the "only three things" on Sun's plate are to 1) recruit every developer on earth to use Sun's software or services (that is, tech adoption, not primarily a financial goal); 2) deliver the world's most compelling commercial offerings (that is, commercial innovation, a financial goal); and 3) execute the world's most effective selling/service connection between 1 and 2. (Oh, is that all?)

Overly broad statements? Maybe. If we've learned anything from Jon Stewart's clinical evisceration of CNBC's on-air nabobs the other night, it's that the presence of a camera can make all kinds of people speak in declarative sentences, with mixed results.

What carries the day, though, is the way Schwartz delivers his pitch for Sun's ultimate success. Whereas your Steve Ballmer would be screaming and throwing chairs (oh, for 3D videoblogging!), and your Steve Jobs would have a fourth list item right at the end of the clip such that you got dizzy and forgot the first three items, and your Carol Bartz would be brisk and possibly unprintable in spots, Schwartz has a mellow and vaguely professorial tone. Of course it'll be okay in the long run. See how calm I am? I talk to bankers on a regular basis and I'm not fretting; in fact, I also talk to media startups, government agencies and telecom firms that are actually doing fine, thanks. Take a moment and let me share the long view with you. (Confidential to J. Schwartz: You're talking to media people who aren't freaking out about the economy? Were they leprechauns?)

And hold tight; like so many shows, it gets much better after the pilot episode. The second episode, which posted late Thursday to YouTube, digs into how the tech-adoption part of the grand equation looks from Schwartz' chair, opening with a story about a company where Sun's placed Solaris and OpenSolaris gear throughout the enterprise, but had trouble getting a foothold for MySQL, even though the firm had a large internal community of MySQL users. (Schwartz speaking of the CEO speaking of MySQL: "He said, 'I banned it.' This is not a buying signal.")

The purpose of these little chats becomes clearer as he puts some meat on the bones: He's not necessarily laying out a State of the Sun roadmap, but providing a low-key, discursive mode for getting some of his thinking concerning free, paid, and subsidized business models out into the open air, shading into some analysis of how free software and Sun's services fit into the market and reaches its audience.

Schwartz, of course, is a big believer in blogging, and whether it's he who wrote the text of these chats or some underling, these monologues have a pleasantly casual way about them -- a conversation (albeit one with you chirping at the screen), not a keynote or an earnings-call overview. Is the digression on Sun's branding strategy as it affects adoption vital information to all listeners? Maybe not, but it leads into thoughts on why Sun finds Red Hat adoptions so very tenacious, and goes on to provide an engaging overview of why he believes in the open-source model -- and a shout-out to Solaris adopters in the Falkland Islands.

The first blog entry went online Monday; the YouTube is below, but Sun has thoughtfully posted the transcript for those who don't mind getting their pep talks on mute. The second blog entry posted late Thursday evening; there's no transcript yet, but the video is on YouTube in two parts, first and second.