Friday November 18, 2005

Why free? That seems to be the question that is being asked of Sun recently. Glassfish/Appserver 8.1 PE. OpenSolaris. OpenSSO. Most recently, free tools. It's that last one that generated a comment when I posted the news to a local Java User Group alias. The comment was essentially centered around "Sun is giving tools away because they couldn't sell them." Nope.

There is also this feeling that participation makes sense only if there is [immediate]money to be made. The quote in particular is

"What people do at home on projects is irrelevant because there is no $$ to be made, so this does not directly matter. "

What do these two comments have in common? They are both based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Sun's changing business model, which IMHO can be summarized in three blogs delivered by our top blogger: The Value in Volume, The Longest Tail, and The Participation Age. Yes, there's a common theme in those blog entries.

Let's think of it this way. There are more developers that have not used our products than have used our products. That's growth opportunity. How do we capture that growth opportunity? We lower the barrier to entry. That makes it extremely easy for potential customers to use our products. Lowering the barrier to entry drives volume [e.g. 3.2 million registered Solaris hosts in roughly 8-9 months]. Volume drives a strong ecosystem. Developers. ISVs. sysadmins. At-home developers. The piece that closes the loop is the communities that bring those developers, sysadmins and Sun together. Simply throwing products and code "over the wall" isn't enough. We want to participate as a member of communities. Within those communities, we want to help, earn respect and trust, and to deliver value. If we do a good job at these, and continue to deliver great products, we can earn business.