How The Game Is Played

Why Sun Doesnt Need VMs

I often have moments of intellectual clarity lyign in bed. Tonight a number of issues I've written about just came together clearly.

As you may recall, a few weeks back I wrote about the trheat that I see PowerPC to be to VMs in the comsumer/desktop space.

(See My Biggest Fear. )

Then, last week I wrote about Yahoo's Music Unlimietd service using Micrsoft's DRM solution "Play for sure."

(See Short Take: Yahoo Music Unlimited )

While these two items might seme to have little in common, by analyziung the second item I realized a startling thing abotu the first:

Sun Doesn't Need VMs in order to succeed.

Now this is a rather heretical statement. At Sun we tend to get focused on our technologies, sometimes to the detriment of the bigger picture. In particular, we have been focused on the VM as our leverage point for Java.

But we're wrong.

I realized this while studying Microsft's DRM solution.The surprising thing about that is this-- you don't need to run Wince on the player in order to use it! Its been ported, by Microsoft, to other handheld operating environments. My initial reaction to this piece of information was confusion-- why would they enable competing products to their own handheld OS? Then it dawned on me that they were being a whole lot smarter then I had been.

Somehing Micrsoft has always understood is that the real position of power is not the OS, but rather the API. Control of the desktop OS has, since Windows, been all about controlling the API. And this is because he who controls the API controls the content, and he who controls the content is king.

I can't stress that last strongly enough. People buy devices not for the technology they are built on, but for the content they provide access to. This has been understood for a long, long time in the consumer space but it is something companies like Sun sometimes find hard to wrap their heads around. Content is everything. Content drives the consumer.

And by making people use their DRM API to play the music, Microsoft achieves their real goal-- total control of the content. At that point what OS it is being played on is totally irellevent to them. Once they have a stranglehold on the content there are a million ways to extract money from the space.

And the lesson for us is this: Its the APIs stupid. And our Java APIs are not dependant on a VM. VM technology is still useful, even advantageous to us today in a world of mixed platforms but its just a technical solution to a particular problem-- portability. If the problem goes away we can still be highly sucesssful if we have established our APIs as the preferred way of programming the content.

The corollary to that is that non VM based Java systems, so long as they are Java systems are not a threat to us but rather could be another path to our goals in the same way that non Wince-based "plays for sure" handhelds are a clear path for Microsoft to attain dominance in the handheld space.

This thought both cheers me and scares me. It cheers me that, even if IBM grabs a hold of the processor space for all consumer applications, we still have a path to victory. It scares me that it falls into a traditional blind spot of ours. Which is the point of this blog-- to shine some light on that dark corner of our thinking and perhapse widen our field of vision.

Posted at 08:04AM Jun 03, 2005 by gameguy in Music  |  Comments[1]