Sun CEC 2007 - NIH Be Gone
Sun's annual Customer Engineering Conference wrapped up yesterday. Officially, the conference themes were Green Computing and "Redshift" - the Internet growth trajectory that is under-served by Moore's law. There was plenty of great content on these themes, but the overwhelming message I walked away with after three days
was that Sun has finally risen above the Not_Invented_Here syndrome that has plagued it's market growth for years.
Todd Fast said it best in a post There is no chicken. There is no egg:
"To most people at Sun, "community" is a walled garden cut off from the real conversation, a case of we know better, shut up and listen. Sun is hardly alone in holding this attitude, but particularly prone to it because of its technology-centric perspective. From that perspective, community is not something that is self-modifying nor self-sustaining, rather it is something to be moderated, controlled, and ultimately held at arm's length. We talk about gathering community in order to drive usage, but we're actually grasping at a shadow of the thing we should want instead—culture."
Courageous and controversial for a circa August 2007 assessment, but accurate to my mind. Less than two months and a few tipping-point innovations later it appears that Sun has truly transcended (ascended?) this navel gazing mindset. Phew.
The transcendence was no more evident than in Tim Bray's talk, "Web 2.0: The Nitty Gritty". He wasted no time getting to the point: Sun underestimated the priority of Time to Market for the Web 2.0 developer. He cited Time to Market as one of four hot developer issues:
- Scalability
- Time to Market
- Maintainability
- Integration
Of the four, Sun placed disproportionate emphasis on Scalability. But new scaling models were emerging and acceptance of perpetual beta service levels was increasing, both of which served to disrupt the market dynamics that propelled Sun to precarious heights in 1999 and 2000. Tim went on to espouse all the advantages and adoption patterns of Ruby on Rails and PHP, which play well in a Time to Market driven business model, while Java was akward for a Test First style of programming. He then went on to say "SOA is bad," sending gasps through the audience. But his statements were really not that controversial to this crowd, whose collective experience suggests the developer marketplace will not wait for Sun. People were smart enough to not take Tim too literally on this latter point, but everyone can make sense of Atom and RSS, while not so for SOA - how many developers have the time or will to wade through WS-* specifications in order to integrate a handful of apps?
The working definition of Choice for Sun engineers of yore (and I count myself among them,) was, "noun, Any color you want as long as it's Indigo". Tim bid this notion goodbye brilliantly.
We're getting on with the business of competing on merit and mindshare. Evidence of transcendence is popping all over the place; heard on an internal conference call today from a software product lead, "We should not constrain ourselves for religious reasons."
You want to do Flash, Flex, AJAX, JavaFX. No problem. You write code in PHP, Ruby, Java? No Problem. You deploy on Linux, Windows, Solaris? No problem. Choice is the new mantra at Sun. There's no more room for NIH fussing anymore.
As Jonathan Schwartz said in his keynote on Tuesday, "Revenue is a lagging indicator of how well you're driving adoption." Given recent growth in Sun's revenue, especially the double digits in software revenue, I'd say we're finally on track with this adoption thing. No factor has been more crucial to the upward trend than the embrace of technologies that did not originate at Sun.
