The Sun event last night was a ton of fun. Tim Bray was a graceful and considerate co-speaker (translation: he didn’t destroy me on at least two occasions when I said something dumb), and we had an interesting discussion on web innovation and the usefulness of venture capital. A good portion of the audience were TechCrunch readers, and many contributed their own nuggets of wisdom to the discussion.
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz also made a cameo appearance at the beginning, noting how much Sun is now listening to customer feedback. Dan Farber captured a couple of quotes:
“We have a little bit of the ‘what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger gene’ at Sun.” That gene is expressed in customer meetings by sitting down, shutting up and listening, he said. “We are trying to work on our listening gene.”
My only regret – I wish Dave Winer was in the audience – we could have had an excellent RSS v. Atom debate as well.
There were lots of video cameras at the event. If anyone has posted video or audio, please let me know.
Unfortunately I was having all my teeth pulled last night, without anesthesia. It was a tough choice, but that seemed like more fun than “debating” with Tim Bray about why his format is better than the one everyone is already using.
RSS v. Atom with Bray and Winer? You could’ve sold tickets to that!