Adam Bosworth, BEA's chief architect, has gone to Google.
I tried to email Adam to congratulate him on making the jump, but none of my guesses about his new email id were right. I'm glad to have him working at a company that's not a direct Oracle competitor. Since he went from Crossgain to BEA, we haven't interacted much, which I missed since Adam is always full of ideas.
I first met Adam in 1997 while he was working at Microsoft on getting their support for XML off the ground. He invited a number of folks from different companies to Microsoft's San Francisco office to talk about some of his ideas on how coarse-grained exchanges of XML messages would become important in the future. I attended the meeting for Oracle. I also crossed paths with him a number of times while participating on the XSL Working Group for Oracle for a few years and presenting often at XML-related conferences.
After that initial meeting with Adam, I proceeded to evangelize XML internally at Oracle and wrote some prototype code in PL/SQL -- the PLSXML Utilities, which amazingly you can still download from OTN -- to illustrate how converting the results of database queries in SQL into XML in an automatic way might help and interest our customers in the future. Initially there were some skeptics internally about how XML could ever become popular. Engineers who had spent the better part of their Oracle careers squeezing as much data as possible into each SQL*Net packet, had a hard time understanding how a verbose text-based format could be interesting for data exchange. "There's more tags than data, for Heaven's sake!" was one comment I remember well. But many internal folks did see the value and a team in our Server Technologies group began working on a more robust Java implementation of a SQL/XML integration layer, our XML SQL Utility. With a Java implementation able to jump-start our ability to offer the functionality to customers, a longer-term effort began to build proper XML type functionality into the database. After several years of hard work, the fruits of that labor became visible in their full functionality with the XML DB features in the Oracle9i Release 2 database. Adam commented to me later at an XML conference, I believe after he moved on to found Crossgain, that Oracle had really executed well on our XML database support. Infoworld recently said they thought so, too. I think our XML DB team has, too!
Adam was working on some really cool ideas for distributed development at Crossgain, and I flew up to Seattle to present our JDeveloper/BC4J story to his engineering leads. A while later they got acquired by BEA. I could only assume after that that they wouldn't be using our technology over at BEA.
Best of luck in your new role, Adam! Hopefully Google will give your big ideas fertile soil to grow in.
8:30:05 PM 
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