Where in the world is Jonathan Schwartz?

Conspicuous in his absence from the Ellison/McNealy peace pipe-fest is Jonathan Schwartz. 10 year reup on Java, Solaris/Oracle bundle, Sun on Oracle ERP, This is the old-style blocking and tacking McNealy has been doing for years. He refers to Google just once in the opening remarks, as the current favorite in the market. Many of Jonathan's issues are glancingly referenced: the phone in the pocket recording a full day's archive, but "better turn it off at night," Scott recommends. No talk about open source databases; Larry seems to have rendered that moot on the back of Sun's hot (and cool) new server bundle with Oracle's database.

It's all reminiscent of the Sun messaging around Java and XML prior to Schwartz' rapid move up. Sun still suffers from having fought the bad fight against SOAP, XML, and even RSS (where Tim Bray tipped over into overt Atom support at precisely the moment RSS reached the critical mass that triggered the Attention tsunami.) Jonathan certainly knows that perception often creates reality, but apparently he doesn't think the gesture that paying Oracle's piper in the form of a subsidy of year one of database support couldn't be seen as a slap in the face of those who wish that money was funneled to MySQL's integration with the Solaris stacki.

I mentioned this to Sun CMO Anil Gadre, who agreed that the database bundle represents "channel conflict" and that the marginalization of Google by Ellison as an immature player coupled with McNealy's glancing "current" darling comment could send a message in variance from the recent Google/Sun announcements and Schwartz's active presence at that event and negotiations. Where there's lack of smoke, is there fire? I doubt it, but I sure hope Jonathan pays attention to this gesture.