Behind the lines with the Gillmor Gang

In the latest Gillmor Gang podcast, the Gang (Steve Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jon Udell, Mike Vizard, Dana Gardner (absent for this show), myself and guest Stephen Shankland of news.com discuss the aftermath of CES, Macworld and the Oracle/Sun happy talk. Much of the show is taken up with Steve's speculations regarding Jonathan Schwartz’s absence from blogging and some recent Sun-related events. Steve thinks that Schwartz, Sun's president and COO, is increasingly attractive to both Microsoft and Google, especially to Redmond with the shift to the network as the computer model. They need someone under Ballmer to run the "Live" transition on a parallel track with Ray Ozzie, (MS CTO) on the development side, Steve says. Schwartz surfaced with a post about CES and then responded to Steve's conspiracy theory post and Gang ramblings with a post. Here's a clip:

Although I appreciate your concern, Steve, please don't read in to my not being at Sun's recent announcement with Oracle (or the Sun Founder's retrospective at the Computer History Museum). I've been on a serious travel jag. I do appreciate the concern - if there's a guy that pushed me to engage in dialog on the net, it was Steve.

Strangely, I received this post in my feed reader with John Lilly as the sender, not Schwartz. John Lilly works in Sun's security/privacy technical group. According to an email from Schwartz, Lilly did an impromptu security audit  that caused some of his entries to show up with Lilly's user name. Case closed, I guess.

I'll agree with Steve, that Schwartz has become a star tech executive and must be getting the headhunter calls and frustrated with the slow progress in getting Sun into a new orbit. But there is no Microsoft in his future unless Microsoft goes open source most if not all the way; otherwise Schwartz would be a software mercenary, which doesn't fit his profile.