As consumer spending slows across the world, a variety of "brick and mortar" retailers are clearly feeling the impact. Foot traffic is slowing, and it's getting harder to balance debt laden real estate portfolios and fickle consumer trends.

For consumer product manufacturers, retail distribution is key - it's how you get in front of a customer. It's why the big PC manufacturers are all working hard to score deals with big retailers (or build their own retail outlets) around the world.

But making money on PC's is tough - for most PC makers, you're remarketing someone else's operating system and someone else's microprocessor - it's not for the faint of heart (or faint of balance sheet). For Sun, our retail distribution concerns don't surround consumer hardware (we don't make PC's) as much as consumer software - the popularity of which defines our market opportunity. …

I was with a customer last week, who leads technology and operations for one of the world's largest companies. We were talking through his priorities for the upcoming year, and on a page filled with various traditional priorities (consolidation, energy management, disaster recovery, regulatory compliance) were two interesting words.

"Open Source."

I asked what that meant, why it was there. He said they'd done an audit of the firm's development activities, and found an overwhelming number ("hundreds") of open source

projects that had been completed behind the scenes, beyond management's oversight. The projects were designed to solve problems deemed too expensive or difficult to solve with proprietary technologies - from meeting a tough budget, to automating a new process. And rather than fight the trend, they figured it was …

De facto standards are the only ones that matter.

That's a bit of a truism in the technology world - well intentioned standards bodies and departments of justice can do their best, but at the end of the day, volume deployment is the only setter of standards. Ubiquity trumps policy, just about every time.

To that point, I was on a panel recently, discussing the impact of technology on the world's more rapidly developing economies (what's often referred to as "BRICA," or Brazil, Russia, India, China and Africa).

One of the speakers referenced an interesting shift in the traditional media industry: western companies were turning their attention toward the developing world. GDP growth wasn't drawing their attention - as much as demographics. Teenagers and those in their early twenties represent the biggest media buyers in …

JavaOne wrapped up on Friday. We hosted individuals from across the globe, and from every industry: consumer electronics and gaming, to enterprise IT, space exploration, factory automation, the automotive industry, academia - like the network itself, Java delivers something for nearly everyone, everywhere.

This year's biggest announcements centered around Java's role in the future of rich internet applications (or RIA's). What's a rich internet application? It depends on your perspective - from mine, it's any network connected application that persists in front of a user, typically outside a browser, that can operate when disconnected from the network.

On the one hand, I'd claim Java's always been a RIA platform - before the world really wanted one. Early Java applets delivered interactivity, but at the expense of development complexity and, in the early days, performance - when a browser, and more recently Javascript, would …

Today, Sun announced we've closed the acquisition of MySQL - MySQL is now officially a part of Sun! From a dinner meeting back in late November, through some introspection from MySQL's CEO, to a closing today in late February - everyone involved showed a great sense of pace, urgency and excitement. And now, it's off to the races!

Since the announcement, I've seen and heard near universal support for the relationship - most everyone wants to know where we're headed, so here's a quick overview of our initial plans.

Starting today, we're rolling out global programs to raise awareness and adoption of MySQL among more established enterprises - you'll see ads like this (to the right) targeting institutions and independent software/service vendors (ISV's) looking to …