Sun CEO Tweets Resignation

Jonathan Schwartz is now the former CEO of Sun Microsystems after he tweeted “Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more,” This after the company was acquired by Oracle and Oracle’s chief executive, Larry Ellison, publicly saying that he hoped that Schwartz would resign rather than play any role in the combined company. Schwartz was the first fortune 200 CEO to blog and is apparently the first to resign via Twitter.

As for his future Schwartz reportedly said “In the short run, I’m planning to spend some long overdue time with my family. Longer run, with a few million businesses and a few billion consumers on the Web, rumor has it there are some interesting opportunities to be had.”

I'll bet he's right!

Source: The New York Times Bits Blog

Free Office alternative

Infoworld.com has detected the addition of StarOffice to the Google Pack page, a site that Google uses to bunch together a collection of free software. StarOffice is an office productivity package developed by Sun Microsystems and is still being offered for sale at $69.95 on Sun's site, but is apparently free in the Google Pack. According to Sun the product offers "Powerful and integrated word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database capabilities". The product does not support Word 2007 file formats but for the price it might be worth looking at, particularly when you compare against the competition. If you are budget minded and don't trust the online options such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets, perhaps StarOffice is your answer. Be sure to check out the Infoworld.com article.