Twitter finds its perfect poetic form

Respect is due to Jonathan Schwartz, chief executive of Sun Microsystems, who announced his resignation on Twitter with a haiku. “Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku,” he tweeted earlier this morning, going on to apply the five/seven/five-syllable rule of the Japanese poem to his situation:

“Financial crisis
Stalled too many customers
CEO no more.”

Schwartz doesn’t include the seasonal reference which is key in the traditional Japanese haiku but I think we can forgive him – and perhaps there’s a hint of winter in the gloom of the financial crisis stalling those customers, in the finality of his last line, drumming in its point with a flurry of single syllables.