Sun CEO’s haiku tweet resignation announcement

I love that Jonathan Schwartz tweeted the announcement that he was leaving Sun, including this haiku: “Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more”.

Two things about it:

  1. You’ve got to appreciate someone who can keep a sense of humor in what must be a pretty difficult time (though perhaps I detect a sigh of relief?)
  2. People assume that a CEO’s role is complex, but, as his succinct comment makes clear, it’s fundamentally simple. Not easy, but straightforward. Understanding what executives want is no mystery.

Information Landscapes – From where we’ve come

I’ve been following the evolution of information visualization since I first blogged in 1998. Well, even before then, Muriel Cooper was leading her students at MIT’s Media Lab to probe on new ways of interacting with textual information. You can see the work she presented at TED5 in 1994, the same year that the Web really took root, in this post from David Young’s blog. But don’t just watch the video — there’s also a link to an in-depth profile of Muriel written by my friend Janet Abrams, and a link to Lisa Strausfeld’s 1995 CHI paper on visualizing financial data. (15 years later, Lisa continues to blaze trails at Pentagram.