Sun Microsystems’ chief information officer (CIO) has backed the vendor’s embrace of corporate blogging, despite difficulties such as ensuring senior executives don’t post comments that affect the stock price and the occasional posting that makes the company’s lawyers “pull their hair out”.
seriousely,why are they suck pricks when it comes to things.
the answer, cause they are worried about other greedy asshole lawyers sueing them
Um, its more of if one of the executives say something they are not suppost to say, making the stock go up, when said product is not ready or doesn’t even exist yet, and said executives or other people sell the stock on this info. Which is called “pump and dump” and is illegel and could be done though a blog, and put Sun in very hot water. Or sensitive corporate info gets out about a new product just because an executive didn’t know not to talk about it yet. Lawyers are the ones that have to worry about this stuff.
Has nothing to do with pump-n-dump. The issue is this; executives are representatives of their company; what ever they say, in the capacity of being a manager, is seen as them speaking on behalf of their companys position in relation to a certain matter.
If they say something, there is the potential for the individual to get sued IF what they said could be construed as to being a forward looking statement in regards to the company policy.
There is nothing wrong with thinking out loud, like Jonathan does – its good to see that an executive is constantly thinking about where his company is heading – the problem occurs when he says something that *COULD* be viewed as something that could happen.
The Novell comment was probably just crappy English; he should have approached it from, “Novell looks like an interesting take over target…” then listed the reasons for and against a take over of Novell etc. etc. atleast *THEN* he would simply be pointing out something rather than implying it being a company policy to persue Novell.
Given the number of inflammatory, distracting, or just plain stupid things that have been said on Sun’s blog’s (courtesy mostly of J.S.), I’d have to side with the lawyers on this one…
If it were illegal to say inflammatory, distracting, or just plain stupid things the internet would not exists and we would all walk round gagged.
I’s human nature, screw the layers.
Pump-n-dump through a blog would probably be the dumbest thing an exec could do. Smarter execs manipulate the press and analyst opinions through suggestion and cooking the books, not driving over the SEC with a blog-tank, saying “Hey, guys, just put me in jail, now!”
I think the Sun blogs are great. There are many interesting posts there from engineers about lots of stuff like zones, filesystem benchmarks, OpenSolaris, etc. Sun could not be Sun, today, without their blogs. It helps keep them an interesting company during a really hard time of re-differentiation against x86 and Linux.
Of course, as with all blogs, there are some stupid postings about mundane things that no one care about (“Hey, guys, here’s what I bought at the mall this weekend!”), but that’s the noise-to-signal problem we’ve grown used to in the Internet-age.
Sun, keep the blogs!