Tuesday February 08, 2005

Office as a service

James Governor is one of the founders of RedMonk, a small industry analyst firm. His Feb 4 blog entry reflecting on what he heard at Sun's recent analyst conference about the Sun's drive into grid and service management was thought provoking. He ends by asking "Why am I so bullish on services and service oriented economics? They seem to have momentum; they are winning in the market. ...... Service management is a notion I subscribe to. Service Oriented Economics will underpin the successful business models of the next few years, ..... Sun is getting ready."

The blog entry was thought provoking because it got me thinking about Openwork, Sun's consulting offering to share our experiences and learnings from the internal work infrastructure program we call iWork. James says "Sometimes it seems like Mr. Schwartz doesn't believe anyone should own things at all, except service providers that is, who should build the infrastructure for us. Rent your house don't buy it... Actually Jonathan would probably rethink house market economics entirely, de bono style. Talk to cable companies and suggest they offer free accommodation in some remote (cheap) corner of the world as part of multimedia services offering--TV, broadband, wifi subscription, music downloads and phone. You get a nice cozy pod and all the multimedia frenzy you can imagine, why bother going outside at all? Excuse the digression but that's the thing with Sun at the moment, there is a lot of innovative thinking going on." He is right there is a lot of innovative thinking going on. It is one of the best things about working for Sun.

So think about distributed work. Currently I don't own an office, but I have one wherever I need one. All I really need is a SunRay and a phone. (With VOIP I probably won't need a phone much longer.) So why not the office as a service. Charge for the SunRay service and the computing power it gives me. My desktop is totally customized for the way I work and is accessible when ever and where ever I insert my Java badge. Why not just throw in the office space for free?