I Believe in IP

I believe in intellectual property. In my view, it's the foundation of world economies, and certainly the foundation upon which Sun Microsystems was built. Copyright, trademark, patent - I believe in them all. I also believe in innovation and competition - and that these beliefs are not mutually exclusive.

If you look at Sun's business, all we really are, like most of our peers in the technology industry (and the media and entertainment industries with which we're converging), is an intellectual property fountain. Pour money in the top, some of the world's most talented people go to work, intellectual property falls out the other end. We happen to turn our IP into storage and servers and software and services - but realistically, that's what our manufacturing and service partners do for us. All Sun ultimately does is create ideas, design systems and engage communities. For the most part, we don't operate large-scale factories or fabs.

Last week, I met with a leader in California politics to discuss our concerns about the state economy (and everything from education to broadband access). I spent a bunch of time talking to him and his staff about the California Performance Review, and the danger in confusing open source, and open standards. And the cynical movement by some companies to conflate those two concepts, to promote their business and lock in consumers with hidden switching costs. We, of course, offered our open source desktop to help bridge the state's digital divide - but made clear to delineate the difference between open source products (OpenOffice and Star Office, eg), and the open standards they support.

Now, a few weeks ago, the CEO of one of the more popular open source companies called and asked me to support their stance on the invalidation of software patents. I listened closely, I respect the guy and his company. But this was the same CEO who forbade Sun from shipping his open source technology with Solaris based on a curious interpretation of the GNU Public License. And based on rabid enforcement of copyright. He was looking for broadscale support for invalidation of software patents - not spurious patents, not the kind that are acquired for litigation, but the whole concept of software patents.

And so I asked - "I'm not sure why you're asking my support to invalidate what Sun's stockholders have invested tens of billions of dollars to create, when you'd cringe if I told you to give away your largest asset, your copyright and brand." His answer, "You just don't understand." He was right, I didn't and don't. And we're going to agree to disagree. He and I, and I with a vocal minority of folks on the 'net who feel software should have no patent protection (leaving copyright and trademark untouched). I do not support that view, any more than I believe any other field of endeavor should be subjected to such a double standard. From drug discovery to academic work, the protection of IP is part and parcel of what incents inventors to invent, and investors to invest.

It's like my father says, "You stand where you sit." My friends in the media or analyst community would get very upset if we published their work without attribution or compensation. No doubt HP would chafe if we presented California's Governor with a plan to save a fortune by moving to use 3rd party inkjet suppliers. And we all know the movie industry tends to be a bit tender about copyright. And Sun has never, unlike IBM, focused on patent aggression (nor is that our strategy, we prefer innovation as a competitive weapon). But we do protect what we build, and we protect those in our communities. (That's what community responsibility is all about.)

So that's a long and windy road to answering some of the questions I've been getting from folks wanting to know why my name was on a few patents filed by Sun - it was to say, "I continue to believe in the protection of ideas conveyed by patents." As does every company that expects to build a durable asset on behalf of its investors, and build a portfolio for defensive purposes against litigators. Rather than float on the cynicism of spurious lawsuits or cynical duplicity, we believe in innovation, and in community.

And as for what I'm going to do with the check Sun will write me for the patent applications - it's going to a really wonderful charity. Another part of community responsibility.

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ps - I guess I did a miserably poor job of communicating with George Colony. And he didn't take me up on reading my blog. Red Hat does not equal linux, and linux is not evil. But, linux in the enterprise datacenter (that is, not your basement or startup or dorm room or gamebox) does equal Red Hat - and competing against a company is what we do for a living. Competing against a social movement we helped to found is a waste of energy, George. My fault for not more effectively communicating.

Posted on 10:48PM Sep 30, 2004 |

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Why I Love Working at Sun

Because I'm literally surrounded by people who think like this.

In an industry that's only going to get more interesting by the day.

Posted on 08:37PM Sep 26, 2004 |

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$1/cpu/hour - the industry's first "computing plan"

I'd consider our Wall Street event a success. What's always most interesting are the customer interactions - one stands out from the dinner event we hosted the evening prior to the keynote presentation.

At that dinner, I had a chance to hear what was on the minds of nearly 20 CIO's and CTO's. Beginning to rebuild the dialog. (In one of America's great museums, btw.)

A few surprising things arose from the discussion - my favorite: the CIO who said, "there are two issues really keeping me up at night. Number one, I'm out of space in my datacenter, computing equipment and storage have filled it to the gills - and real estate's not getting any cheaper; number two, I can no longer supply enough power to, or exhaust heat from the place. I feel like I'm running hot plates, not computers."

I asked him if he felt these were the issues he would've projected himself to be worrying about five years ago, "no way."

As you know, we've been working on both problems - radical form factor compression, with radically lower power consumption. How low? A 32-way Niagara system, roughly the same performance of 32 xeon's, will consume...

56 to 60 watts. Less than your basic lamp. I feel great about our design center.

The other really interesting comment arose from our discussion of $1/hr for a Solaris/CPU (SPARC or x86). (Which harkens back to earlier musings on the commoditization of bandwidth fueling the largest companies on earth.)

As you know, we're fundamentally in the business of supplying technology to companies that, without question, customize our products for their businesses - their own configurations, their own software stacks, their own "one of everything" datacenters (often doubling as computer museums). It's expensive for them to operate, and for us to support. This is the polar opposite of Salesforce.com or Exult, to which businesses are now customizing their workflows to leverage the efficiency and cost reductions of a shared web service. Which allows Salesforce and Exult to compress the traditional competition, save companies money and deliver better service. It's not for everyone, but certainly a massive and underserved market.

So when we announced our $1/cpu/hour pricing for our N1 Grid (as opposed to the ever so slightly different ones everyone seems to be building), we knew we'd strike a chord. Why build and operate what Sun could deliver as a web service? Priced by the drink, no less.

So we're now engaged with a growing population of companies to talk about leveraging an "on demand grid" for their workloads. We're also engaged with a number of CIO's who've asked their teams to benchmark their internal compute grids against $1/cpu/hr. All in, all up, at least there's now a benchmark. If they buy from us, they can simply turn the bill over to their internal clients.

And if nothing else, we've now put a stake in the ground. If you're paying more than $1/cpu/hour, odds are you're overpaying (and possibly overbuilding - another customer told me utilization in their xSeries blade farm was below 10%!).

So the N1 Grid on demand now has a price: it's a buck an hour for the OS, a CPU, memory and storage. The computing industry's first "calling plan" has just been introduced. Now let the price wars begin!! :)

And for fans of such things, we've also begun discussing the evolution of a secondary market for compute power. How cool would that be...

____________

ps - I guess volume won again.

pps - here's a really thoughtful speech (with some less thoughtful tax policy, but we Americans tend to shy away from thoughts like that).

Posted on 08:43PM Sep 25, 2004 |

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The N1 Grid Service - A True Computing Utility

UPDATE: quick update to the post below. Go here for more details and to test drive some of the technologies.

I was with a CIO from a big investment bank about three months ago. He, and his team, are some of the more innovative folks on Wall Street, creating infrastructure when their demands exceed the IT industry's ability to keep up (though not quite to the extent as the bank that still internally maintains their *own* linux distro). They drive us hard.

Our discussion was wide ranging - mostly a brainstorming session. He told me all about how much it was costing them to provision infrastructure, manage infrastructure, operate infrastructure, etc. They wanted to know what we were doing about "virtualization." Now, one man's virtualization is another man's outsourcing contract - so we spent some time getting down to brass tacks. "What do you mean by virtualization?" I asked.

And it turns out what he meant was, he wanted to reduce the cost of running his infrastructure. He was spending a ton of money operating what was supposed to be a commodity. Virtualization, in his definition, was technology that would automate those processes.

Now as you probably know, the IT industry is obsessed with "virtualization." It's the buzzword of the day (sorry, couldn't resist). But I wanted to try a new theory - "What would you think," I asked, "if Sun built out a farm of 20,000 CPU's, all running Solaris, divisable into "Trusted" containers? And I sold you the right to use (RTU) an industry standard OS/CPU combination in increments of cpu-hours? Solaris/Opteron or Solaris/SPARC, you pick. We'll run all your Red Hat apps in a Janus partition, and spare you the license cost."

Good news - he paused. "You'd charge me by the cpu hour? Sounds interesting. How much would you charge me?" Good question. My response, "No clue, but we could put the RTU's on eBay and see what happened."

He smiled, and responded, "Probably doesn't make any sense." Why? Because he said we were unlikely to meet his transactional requirements over the internet - connecting systems across the globe still meant latency (the speed of light, if nothing else) had an impact on their business performance.

"Frankly," I said, "I'm not interested in workloads with those sensitivities. Let's keep this simple. We'll provision cpu's by the hour running Solaris Containers. In Siberia, for all I care (to keep cooling/real estate costs low - no offense to our friends in Siberia). And we'll tell our customers - if you have comptutational workloads, that require 10's or 100's or 1,000's of cpu's, for defined periods of time (ie, 5 hours, or 3 days or 3 months) - discrete jobs like rendering a movie, or doing a monte carlo or geophysical simulation, or modeling a protein - then we can run your loads on demand for less than anyone in the industry. He went on to say, "clever idea, doesn't make a lot of sense." Ah well. I thought...

Since then, I've met with a movie studio, rendering one of the new superhero movies, and they said "AWESOME, love to not have to own the farm that renders the monsters. We just throw it away at the end of the movie anyways." I met with a company that designs jet aircraft, and they said "FABULOUS, love to not have to own the farm that runs the finite element wing sumlations," and I spent some time with a buddy of mine in academia, who said, "GREAT, love to let you deal with my compute farm - I'd like to get back to folding proteins." Maybe the idea has legs.

And then the banking CIO called back, and said, "I thought about it, and it's not a lot of our workload, but I bet we could take 5-10% of our workload and leverage your compute farm. When's it up on eBay?"

Now you know why we're announcing a new compute utility tomorrow morning - taking N1 to its next logical step, to a secure N1 Grid service, available on demand, to any customer with a credit card, or a purchase order. In increments of an hour. A virtual compute ranch - virtual because you don't employ the people, or operate the technology that manages it. A grid that let's your network do the walking.

And what's the price going to be? You may have to look on eBay. Or we'll just throw out a number. Maybe both.

And here's a view on why this is one of the most important announcements we'll make this year: what Google, eBay and Salesforce.com are proving are the economics of using someone else's uniformly standardized infrastructure to run your business. Sun's business, historically, has been the opposite - we deliver infrastructure to customers who work with us to customize that infrastructure to unique workloads. What salesforce.com and others prove is that there are some workloads for which the reverse can be true - mapping the workload, like salesforce automation, to a singular service provider with a common infrastructure, yields savings from economies of scale that vastly outweigh any potential expense in changing workflows/workloads. The ASP (application service provider) model is, in fact, a great model.

One man's virtualization is another man's web service. The era of mapping workloads to network service infrastructure is officially underway.

Price per cpu/hour?

Stay tuned tomorrow.

And the best part about running Solaris 10? You, or your business, would be in a position to sell trusted containers, raw compute power, "back to the grid" when your exchange is closed, your employees have gone home, or your machines aren't in use. Talk about turning the industry inside out...

Posted on 07:24PM Sep 20, 2004 |

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Nicholas Carr is not invited.

As you may know, I and my team have been focused on reengaging customers on Wall Street. Why? Because they're demanding customers running demanding businesses, and they've got the money, and moreover the motivation, to redefine the computing industry every few years. Few other customers have that kind of technical or financial throw weight.

If you've ever seen my travel schedule, you'd see I spend a ton of time in NYC, talking to the folks we think are changing the industry. Moreover, I've got someone on my direct staff whose sole job is connecting our R&D and business teams to the top financial institutions. I get near daily (more like nightly) updates. Believe me, we're focused like you've never seen. Like one of those little red dots.

This coming week, we're going to be talking about returning to our roots with our Wall Street customers, in NYC. Going back to the customers that really helped to build Sun. Returning to the swamp from which we spawned. (I mean that with all due affection :) I'm bringing most of my staff, as well. We hunt in packs.

One of the coolest gatherings will be our geekfest - an opportunity to rub shoulders with the people inventing the technologies that are redefining Sun. Hardware, software, service, storage - and business models. And I want to offer an open invitation to the developer community, especially the new JPMC team to come learn all about the rocket science in Solaris, the industry's fastest x86 servers, chip multi-threading, and taking Java to the next level. And more.

Just send an email to suntechnologyforwallstreet@sun.com to register. There may even be free beer. Speaking of which...

____________

To the Open Office Community:

Please do not listen to the bizarro numbskull anti-Sun conspiracy theorists. They were lunatics then, they are lunatics now, they will always be lunatics. We love the open source community, we spawned from it. We'll protect that community, that innovation, and our place in it, with all our heart and energy.

Just think, next to J2ME, OpenOffice is the single highest volume product we've ever delivered. In the history of our company. You know my views on volume. Dorking that up is not in our strategic plan.

OpenOffice matters. Moreso every day.

And btw, selling cash to Fujitsu, doesn't make a lot of sense.

Posted on 12:45PM Sep 16, 2004 |

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The difference between humans and white mice.

I'm watching with amusement as IBM prepares to stub its toe with their new, curiously named "OpenPower" low-end boxes.

Now, I will freely admit I am entirely confused by what they're doing. Why on earth would you ship a proprietary computer that doesn't run your own operating system (AIX)? If I were trying to freak out my installed base, that's exactly what I'd do.

Surely they should read my earlier entry here, regarding the history of OS blunders, and the difference between humans and white mice. (White mice learn from history, while humans have a harder time in far broader fields of endeavor.) Chips don't matter if they don't have software (see Dec ALPHA for the ideal example), and software doesn't matter if it doesn't run in volume (see HP/UX on Itanium).

Second, saying "it's ok, we run linux" is like saying you "run the internet." Sure feels like IBM is trying to avoid specifying the distro. Why? Because they'd be doing demand creation for Red Hat. And why buy WebSphere when you can just use what comes in Red Hat? - "Jonas (Red Hat's app server) is just a toy, it's just for the low end" said IBM's exec at the Smith Barney Tech Conference I just attended in NYC. Notwithstanding the familiarity of that refrain to how linux itself was mistakenly positioned a few years ago, the irony is that IBM is positioning these new boxes as low end boxes. Presumably ideal for running a low end app server, and just using what's in Red Hat.

Finally, the 'P' in Power5 stands for Proprietary. You can't claim your chip is open if you're the exclusive supplier, guys - at least you can dual source SPARC from Sun or Fujitsu. Perhaps we should rename SPARC OpenSPARC. Nah, I like what AMD is doing with "industry standard" better. And while SPARC is outshipping Power 3:1 (so sayeth IDC), sure sounds like we're the industry standard.

IBM saying they're using this to come after Sun really suggests they've gone a few degrees shy of plumb - the single biggest threat to low-end SPARC isn't a funny low volume Power5 box without an operating system. The big alternative to SPARC arose years ago from volume in the x86 market. That's why we've built out the most complete family of Solaris/Opteron systems the industry has to offer, and we're starting to drive into the $20B+ x86 market. Volume has spoken.

That's also why we changed tack with SPARC, to move away from the single thread approach, to truly parallelized multi-core computing. And not just a tepid two core approach - the internet is one massive, multi-threaded application environment. Every user is, for all intents and purposes, his own thread - whether they're shopping for chandeliers on eBay, or managing wealth at Lehman Brothers. So if you want to see what multi-core computing looks like, allow me to help. It looks like this:

This is the silicon for our Project Niagara chip: 8 cores * 4 threads per core = a 32-way computer. On a chip.

And did I mention we have silicon, and not just a JPEG file?

And I saved the best for last. Are you ready?

It's already running Solaris. A volume OS that eats threads for lunch, on the world's most advanced massively parallelized silicon.

That's not just a box.

That's what we call a system. A system built for internet workloads. Not for the expedience of a press release. And a system that gives customers yet more choice, rather than taking choice away.

(And before you ask, yes, we are planning a nicer box when we ship :)

Posted on 09:59PM Sep 10, 2004 |

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Volume wins.

As I've said, I'm a big believer in the idea that volume wins. And we invest (much to the occasional befuddlement of our friends on Wall Street) to support that thesis - most notably in the propagation of our programming platform, Java.

And in the J2ME mobile handset platform, the dividends are beginning to appear - in the form of the single most popular platform those devices have ever seen (as measured, of course, by volume - which happens to be a handy precursor for revenue for every network service imagineable). That volume begets more volume, more licensees, more apps, more infrastructure. And so forth.

At last count, we had 350,000,000 (that's 350 MILLION - forgive me for enjoying typing so many zeros) Java enabled phones, more than 1,750,000,000 (sorry, had to do it again) devices total. That's a ton of volume. Some of our folks are headlining over at the ITU Telecom Asia conference this week in arguably the world's most important mobile marketplace - a marketplace that embraced Java way ahead of the rest of the world, and now leads the world in volume and service revenues.

And it's with particular pride that we noted our newest app server, the J2EE SDK, happens to be driving some very significant volumes - volumes which surpass our friends at IBM, in mind and market share. (Granted, I'm not particularly proud of the way we achieved the leading mindshare, but at this point, if life hands you lemons...). To our app server team - congrats, folks. It's been a big hill to climb, but no looking back. Rumor has it we've got some pretty stunning performance to talk about, too. Read the full report here (registration required).

Traditionally, the J2EE SDK has been the principle vehicle through which developers learn about J2EE, but you couldn't deploy it in production. It's now both our core application server, and given a simple change to the license for the SDK - it can now be deployed in production. That volume now sets the foundation to build a far broader business. While radically lowering the cost to ISV's and customers. Deploy away.

Like I said, volume wins. And we're making progress.

And as you know, we're continuing to examine opportunities to deliver Solaris on Itanium. And although we've received a warm embrace from some of the more forward looking executives, I must say I'm disappointed to see some pretty irresponsible comments coming out of the Intel's Developer Forum. Makes me question whether shipping Itanium in any real volume is even part of their strategy. I thought only the paranoid survived.

Posted on 09:51PM Sep 05, 2004 |

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Innovation is not a threat to GNU/linux

Headlines like this and this really drive me nuts.

Sun is not a threat to GNU/linux. Innovation is not a threat to GNU/linux. dTrace is not a threat to linux. Nor is Solaris 10, nor Janus. Nor is our new comp plan.

They are a problem for Red Hat. And Red Hat is not linux, despite what they say, and despite what the media (and IBM's ads) seem to conflate.

To my friends in the media, you are confusing a social movement with a single company - that social movement is all about choice, innovation and freedom. Not dominance or dependence. In that light, no innovation Sun delivers, in comp models or bits, can be anti-linux.

Let's get specific. Let's start calling a distro a distro.

Posted on 06:39AM Sep 01, 2004 |

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