Georgetown MBA Internship Diary: Ian

Closing Remarks

   It's been a fascinating and challenging twelve weeks, and I really didn't like handing in my badge on Friday.

   On a brighter note, my presentation has generated a lot of interest within several different departments at Sun. I was invited to give the presentation again to a different audience, and have had several one-on-one meetings to talk about the execution of some of my ideas. There may even be some opportunities to continue my relationship with Sun during the school year!

   I think that's really exciting. But I also recognize that those of you planning your own internships are probably more interested in actionable information towards your own goals. That's certainly fair, and to that effect I'd like to make five suggestions based on my experience this summer:

1.) Select an internship that will allow you to grow your skillset. And if possible, do so at a company you'd like to work for after graduation.
2.) Use your electives to help you prepare. The two extra marketing courses I took really made a difference.
3.) Once it starts, recognize that you have a free pass to ask for meetings with people who already have your dream job. Use it! Set up meetings and talk to them!
4.) Don't shy away from tasks you feel are below your station. They're chances to prove you can (and should) be invited to work on the more difficult challenges.
5.) Make sure you have some vacation time between exams and your internship, and between the end of your internship and the start of the fall module. That being said, take the longest internship you can - I'm really glad I had twelve weeks (and not less).

   I will be talking about my internship at the 2008 Georgetown Inside the Internship event, and about Sun more generally at events to follow. There won't be any more updates to this blog, but I will continue to write at AmiableCoder, and you can always send me an email.

Surprise!

    My last major project at Sun was to put together a strategy recommendation on how Sun could better connect with university students. I'd been researching and building the presentation for a few weeks, and by Wednesday morning I felt was on schedule for my deliverable date of August 7th.

Then, Wednesday at 3pm, I was asked if I could give it the following morning.

    So, crunch time. I worked from 3-11pm, slept restlessly, and did a little more work on it in the morning between meetings. I arrived in the room 5 minutes early to met the 20-or-so directors and managers I would be presenting to, and then delivered from 11-12pm.

    I really think it went well. There was lot of active feedback and discussion during the presentation, and several requests afterward for follow-up meetings. I've even been invited to give the same presentation to a different audience.

   My favorite compliment: At one point someone interrupted me and said "Is he really an intern? He doesn't sound like an intern. Someone hire him!"

I believe that management communication course just paid for itself.

Rotation

    Technology, and technology infrastructure in particular, is hard. (Having spent a little time in Competitive Intelligence, I feel I can especially appreciate that.) For our customers, the amount and complexity of the information available on our systems and those of our competitors is nothing short of overwhelming. So how do they make decisions on which systems to buy?

    They rely on the knowledge of their own people, vendor sales and engineering teams, and industry analysts who write about technology offerings. But disproportionately the analysts. What they says about your products matters.

    Therefore, most if not all of the major technology companies have analyst relations departments. Having completed my assignments with the Competitive Intelligence team, I've been rotated into the AR team. Our job is to develop and maintain relationships with the industry analysts, and brief them regularly on their products and services. That may mean we convey the information ourselves, or we get the product managers and the analysts together in the same room and help drive discussion. The goal is to make sure those analysts understand our products and messaging so that they can properly convey that information in their research reports.

    Honestly, it's felt like a whirlwind of rock stars. I've had the chance to meet some really intelligent analysts from the Yankee Group and Redmonk, and product managers for some incredible products like xVM, JavaFX, NetBeans (mentioned before here) and zembly (which I talked about on AmiableCoder).

I can hardly wait to get to work next week!

Real Voting

     One of my favorite things about a market economy and the internet is how easily and often you can vote for the things you like. Much like more traditional shopping methods, there are three degrees of voting while you're on the web.

    First degree voting is what you do with your own bandwidth. Going to the websites you like, downloading the free (or open source!) products you think are cool. And that's pretty good, but for the things you really like you can help other people vote with you.

     Second degree voting is influencing what other people do with their bandwidth. Telling your friends about those websites you like, and helping direct traffic to them. Email works, but posting those links on your own webpages, blogs or social networks is faster and reaches a larger audience. And it has the added benefit of allowing your links to be picked up by search engines, driving up the relevancy rankings of the content you like. Now you're helping the whole community find great content.

     Third degree voting is purchasing. Buying the content you like, or buying from it's advertisers directly. This can mean buying physical objects that are then shipped to you, buying digital content online, or buying a subscription (software as a service).

      So, in the spirit of voting for great content:

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

Bottom Line: Reconsider your subscriptions to older channels of media distribution. The next time you flip through the multitude of cable channels and (short of the even present James Bond marathon running on TNT) realize there is nothing on you want to watch, consider this: For the cost of an average cable bill, you could be watching a couple of your favorite shows or movies a night, on demand. And you'd be directly voting for the creation of more of the specific content you love!

On a More Personal Note

    In all of the searching, career fairs, career treks, interviews, and finally planning that went into this internship, I never once considered that living 3,000 miles away from my wife all summer might be a little tough.

Let me tell you. It is.

    But this week, as her fiscal year has just ended, she's out here to visit me for nine days. We have a weekend in San Francisco planned, lunches and dinners scheduled with mutual friends, and a few local attractions we've singled out for a visit. It's going to be a great week!

Home Field Advantage

    Free from homework and late-night group meetings, I've found time to add a couple new activities to my day.

     The first is attending events for some of the professional organizations in the bay area. To the menagerie of groups, societies, guilds and organizations I found on the web, I applied a rigorous search criteria: I wanted an organization that had frequent events on topics that interested me and had membership/event fees that welcomed individuals (i.e., under $100). By good fortune, the two I singled out were WebGuild and BayCHI. The events I've attended have all had excellent speakers, and the pre-event networking time allowed me the opportunity to get to know some really interesting people (and companies!) in the bay area.

      The second is learning Rails. Ruby on Rails, often abbreviated Rails, "is a free web application framework designed to make web development faster, simpler and more efficient". The beauty and the power of rails is that it focuses convention over configuration, which means that a web developer doesn't have to specify *everything* about the web application; rather he or she only need specify what is unique.

     To envision why this is so powerful, imagine all the work and planning that goes into building a new house from the ground up. First of all, an architect has to design it. Then, materials have to be shipped to the construction site, and crews can work to put in the foundations, walls, doors and windows. Later, the roof has to be built. And *then* you can start on all the interior!

     What if you could just say "I want the same house as that guy, except I want a second bedroom, the kitchen needs to be 16' longer, and I want skylights over the living room". Upon telling that to Ruby Construction Co, a house just like your neighbors suddenly appears, completely assembled, and the construction crew can begin making the custom modifications you asked for right away. The whole house is done in a few months.That's Rails.

     As you can get core functionality working in minutes, Ruby on Rails is rapidly gaining in popularity. And because it's so different than my previous experiences in software development, I wanted to make sure I understood the core features of the framework. As a product manager, I may not get to write code anymore, but it is important that I understand what the engineers are talking about!

     Based on the recommendations of other developers (and some of my own comparisons) I found that the best IDE for Ruby is NetBeans, an open source project donated by Sun Microsystems (NetBeans was not always open source). It was then that I really understood the whole picture: Sun has made freely available everything you need to write and run your software in any way that you want. And then when you're ready, they provide the enterprise level hardware and support you need to maintain it.

    The global playing field for software development is looking very even, and Sun's logo is on the 50 yard line.

Rebranding Java

    This week I had the chance to meet with Ingrid Van Den Hoogen, the Senior Vice President of Brand and Global Communications. She met a few of us for an hour at a welcome-interns event, and then later that day gave a presentation to the whole brand and global comms team on the FY2009 plan (Sun has a June-June fiscal year.)

    Ingrid was responsible for rebranding Java, what I would consider Sun's most important strategic marketing move this decade. As you may (or more appropriately may not) recall, by 2002 Java as a brand had been mostly forgotten by consumers. Once a dot com darling, constant innovation and evolution had left it buried under acronyms like J2EE, J2SE, and J2ME. This is a technology that powers 4.5 billion devices, and yet Ingrid's predecessor was signing requirements with Java platform developers that they should not display the java logo as the device powered up.

    What? Free advertising on billions of devices? For the David(Sun) in an arena of Goliath's(IBM, HP) who have orders of magnitude larger marketing budgets? Sun would have none of that!

    Good thing my hindsight is so laser accurate.

    Suffice to say Sun has made many of the right decisions in the last five years it should have made ten years ago, and it's had to learn the hard way that brands and reputations are difficult, difficult things to build and are very easy to lose. Paraphrasing Ingrid's response to my question of "How did you know to rebrand Java, and why did you have to?", all sins are forgiven when you're growing too quickly for it to matter, but those days never last as long as you think.

Product Management and Product Marketing

     At one of the intern events last week, I was fortunate to meet someone from the JavaFX team. As I wanted to better understand what the Product Manager role meant for Sun's software products and how it was different than Product Marketing (every tech company I speak to seems to define those roles a little differently), I asked if she could put me in touch with one of the product managers on her team. She was kind enough to do so, and I met with him this week.

     He explained that at Sun, a Product Marketing Manager is responsible for broad market research and for identifying market opportunities. Once he or she has identified a position that is attractive and winnable,that information is passed to a Product Manager.

     The Product Manager is then responsible for creating the product definition, overseeing its development, and managing the product through it's life cycle. That puts product managers right at the intersection of broad marketing requirements, engineering capacity and sales revenue. They are ultimately responsible for the development, launch and success of their products.

      Product Management, specifically for a software product, is my short term career goal. I especially like the parts about turning broad requirements into specific products, working across multiple disciplines, and having ultimate P&L responsibility for my work. And it's a natural step from my background as a software developer!

     We spoke at length about his career (his background is very similar to my own), his experiences at Sun, and the future of JavaFX. It was a great conversation, and very educational. I'm more excited than ever to finish my MBA and to start managing the development of a fantastic software product.

Storytelling

     I recently drafted a competitive presentation, targeted at Sun employees, to help them understand how to position Solaris against offerings from IBM, HP, Microsoft, Red Hat and Novell. It was concise, accurate, and throughly researched. And Larry Wake handed it right back to me.

It didn't tell a story.

     Unix operating systems are complex products. I had started by asking "What are the metrics the customer cares about?" We may love to tout the strengths of DTrace, but what is the business problem that solves for the customer? How does it address his concerns? I spent an afternoon digging through Sun's market research library, spoke to several competitive experts, and came up with the top 10 dimensions on which a customer makes a decision to purchase a Unix operating system. Concerns such as "Am I locked into a proprietary solution?", "How long will you support me?", and "Can it scale with my business?".

     Tempted as I might have been to go right for the spider chart, I instead drew up a side by side comparison between Solaris and AIX. Fantastic discovery #1 - On my top 10 list of customer dimensions, there is not one on which AIX is a better choice than Solaris. Outstanding! I then decided, for the purpose of building a story, that I would disregard anything on which Solaris and AIX were even - I wanted only what differentiated Solaris. I wanted to know why it was better. And I was left with this:

     You should use Sun's Solaris over IBM's AIX because it's open source (no proprietary lock-in), binary compatible across versions, and it scales from a single PC in your garage to the most powerful server Sun makes. On all other relevant dimensions, IBM and Solaris are about equal strength.

     Those are all true, well researched, organized facts. You may find them accurate, insightful, or even surprising. But they aren't memorable.

     So after Larry pushed back, I started brainstorming analogies. To make a long story short (too late), I came up with the analogy of a desert island. Buying IBM's Unix solutions allows you to pick from one of three desert islands. They support you, bring food, water, etc, and you'll have everything you need. However, you can't scale, change software or hardware platforms, or otherwise ever leave your island. Buying from Sun, on the other hand, is like buying a ranch. You're free to expand your land in any direction you choose. You can sublet parts of the ranch to area experts, or redistribute land to a new use as you see fit. And if you need to relocate to another ranch, you're free to do so.

Which story would you rather tell your CIO?

OpenSolaris Install

     Even though my personal opinion counts for exactly one vote in a pool of millions, I wanted some hands on experience with the products I'm going to be marketing. I started with OpenSolaris:

1.) I fired up Fusion, since I already use it for running my bootcamp partition. (If you need desktop virtualization software, try VirtualBox - it works well too, and it's free.)
2.) Downloaded the OpenSolaris ISO.
3.) Started a new VM, and mounted the ISO image. The installation amazed me - it only asked my approval for a few reasonable defaults, rather than my help on anything technical. I've been asked harder questions ordering at a restaurant.

     The only thing that didn't work right off the bat for me was the sound. However, thanks to a great walkthrough, I just downloaded the drivers and ran pkgadd -d.

     Then I decided I wanted to install OpenOffice. What I liked in apt-get, I love in pkg. I opened a terminal window, typed "pkg openoffice" (I was just guessing), and it did the rest. I was really impressed - I can't wait for pkg sandwich.