How much time do you have to do back-burner projects since you've taken on this new role?

Not as much as I'd like, but more time than I'll admit to. There are a fair number of meetings on my schedule. But I think I manage about 20 percent of my time to back-burner stuff.

And I mean back-burner things that I specifically work on. I actually spend a lot of time [on back-burner projects]. Sun has a number of folks off in corners doing back-burner projects. I think that one of my more important roles is to help them out and deal with the care and feeding of them.

Often these are things that are making the transition from the labs or back-burner things to real products. It's really like the real-time thing I talked about. That's something that had been a series of little back-burner projects that coalesced and finally got real funding and now has an actual engineering team, and they're now doing customer trials and it's like, "Ah, cool!"

Any others you can identify?

Well, Looking Glass was one of them. The JOGL API—Java OpenGL API—started as a little back-burner thing. There was one that never went anywhere … called Relator, which was a way to build user interfaces, which I actually quite liked. But it didn't work out. And I actually think that having things not work out is a good thing because it means you're being a little edgy.

This article was first published on eweek.com.