From November 2006 to January 2008, I was the Sun Campus Ambassador (SCA) at the University of Southern Denmark. As an SCA, I primarily did presentations on Solaris, NetBeans etc. which were really fun to do. But one of the more interesting experiences were that I had the opportunity to e-mail a bit back and forth with the CEO of Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz. The fact the CEO of a 35 000 employee company took the time to e-mail me (a part-time employee not even working in a Sun office) was really impressive.

The initial topic of conversation was not interesting. I was shining up my Sun blog and figured I’d copy some of the layout from Jonathans blog – more specifically the links to various Sun downloads. I noticed that the NetBeans download link was broken (.com had been moved to .org) and since I didn’t see any webmaster links, I wrote directly to him. I didn’t expect a reply, but got one that same Sunday that I wrote him. Not only did he thank me for letting him know about the link, but he also asked “how we were doing in Denmark”.

I was pretty excited! I know it may sound stupid, but he’s a really cool guy (watch some videos of him online) and with busy his schedule, I didn’t expect him to spend time on me. I explained how we were doing with regards to adoption of the various Sun products that I was promoting. And again, he replied back (that same Sunday) asking what I thought we should do to improve this adoption. I told him what I thought would work for students in Denmark. After that mail, I didn’t hear from him again. It didn’t bother me -I was just happy that I’d heard back from him.

But he hadn’t disregarded my e-mail. One of the elements I had mentioned needed improvement was driver support in Solaris – we had many problems installing Solaris on our laptops, mostly due to the lack of drivers. Jonathan had forwarded my e-mail to the person in charge of Solaris laptop compatibility in Sun, who contacted me a few days later asking for all the information I could gather about the problems we had (laptop brands/models, description of problem etc.).

To me, that’s pretty amazing. I can’t imagine any other CEO of such a huge company to do take the time to respond several times (on a Sunday) and listen to opinions from what is probably one of the smallest positions in the entire company. And then forward my problems to another person who can help me out. I really admire and respect Sun for all of their innovations and their contributions to the open source community and this experience definitely didn’t change that.