To Jonathan Schwartz,

The Ephox engineering team saw the really cool work you’ve done on project blackbox and we’ve come up with a marketing idea that would help you show just how portable blackboxes really are.

In essence, the idea is to take a blackbox on a travelling road show around to Sun’s potential clients to show off what it’s capable of. The trouble is, there’s no point in just dumping a container outside their door and saying “cool, huh?” – it’s got to actually do something cool when you put it there. That’s where we come in.

We propose that we take a big semi-trailer, put a blackbox on it along with a power generator in a sister container1 and take the Ephox engineers on a road trip. We’ll run OpenSolaris on the servers in the box for all our development needs. Plus whe can develop on SunRays connected through to servers in the box to show off Sun’s remove terminal technology. Considering we develop against a huge range of enterprise CMS systems (IBM Workplace, Vignette, Stellent, Percussion and more), we could make good use of all that computing power. It shouldn’t be too hard to set up a wireless link to a fitted out Airstream for us to follow along behind and work from.

Heck, throw a Thumper in for storage space, invite Robert Scoble and video blog it. It’d be a travelling Sun technology demonstration. You could even go international – just stash the blackbox in the hull of a cruise ship2 and we’ll keep “working” from the pool deck.

I’m sure Ephox would go for it – after all, we get free office space for our developers and since big fortune 500 companies are right in the middle of our market, we’d sell Sun hardware and EditLive! at the same time!

Just drop me an email – we’ll do lunch and sort out the details.

1 – running on bio-diesel of course↩

2 – the excess baggage fees might cost a bit…↩