A Quick Update

I love America's Thanksgiving. Frankly, I love any holiday that focuses on food. It finally gave me a spare minute to write a blog or two. Which I am now delinquent in posting. Forgive me for rambling a bit, must be all those turkey leftovers.

Last week, I did a panel with Charlie Rose, which like the article I just wrote for Harvard Business Review, will not be available on the web without a payment. How 20th Century. How Web 1.0.

But looking forward, I had dinner this evening with the CEO of a great web 2.0 company. His big issues? Not how fast or cheap his computers were (he was running on Opteron whiteboxes, using a home built Linux distro with a custom derivative of a popular open source database) - but instead, his power bills, heat dissipation, his storage performance, and managing a tangle of open source projects. How web 2.0 :) James is right, at least in my view. Sun will be the Dot in Web 2.0. No shame in saying it. (I, for one, hated giving up "We're the dot in dot com.")

I also spent today in Arizona at a tech investor conference, talking to investors about the impact of Solaris unit volumes and IBM's recent endorsement (and how we're hearing from HP's customers that they'd like to see something similar between HP and Sun - happily, the door is open!). We also talked about our new 9.6GHz Niagara chip, running at 70 Watts - and a few of them had gone and talked to their datacenter folks - sure enough, power was a crisis for many/most of them, and Niagara is definitely on their radar. We plan on making that even more obvious next week.

And tomorrow, of course, we're planning on amplifying our current successes with open source and volume distribution. If you'd like rationale on what we're announcing, you don't have to go far. Just read this, and this, and this. And this," of course. We're bringing it all together tomorrow.

On a more entertaining note, you just have to love the folks helping to build the Solaris community at Blastwave.org. Check out the lineup. See if you can pick the one that probably cares most about the performance optimization for file transfer :)

Posted on 11:21PM Nov 29, 2005 |

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Rebuilding a Great Partnership

Thanks, Larry. Very much appreciated.

Posted on 11:13PM Nov 14, 2005 | Comments[1]

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Recipe for Winning Chip Battles

I will admit, I do get razzed (especially from within Sun) for writing so much about software. So in order to change stripe for a moment, I thought I'd put together some thoughts on Sun's position in the chip business, relative to both IBM and Intel. Here's my view of how to win a microprocessor battle.

Step 1. Make absolutely sure you have a volume operating system, and tons of ISV's. (And there you were thinking I was going to focus on hardware.)

Step 2. Have the fastest chip on earth.

Yes, the ordering is deliberate, and yes, my view is that software generally, and operating systems specifically, are the primary differentiator in microprocessor battles. Here are a few examples.

If you don't have a fast chip, but you have a volume operating system, time's your enemy - but you'll live to fight another day. Witness the enduring value of Intel's Xeon platform, which despite AMD Opteron's widening performance lead over Intel, has a legacy of support from Microsoft Windows (and Red Hat and Solaris) to carry it long into the future. It'll likely lose share between now and 2009, but it's certainly still in the game.

Let's look at the opposite scenario. Imagine you don't have a volume operating system, but you have a fast chip. In my view, that fight is futile. There are innumerable examples from history - the most famous, of course, being Digital Equipment Corporation's (now HP's) Alpha. Which despite blowing everyone away with performance (in its day), lacked either a volume OS or support from independent software vendors (ISV's). It died a lingering death. Intel's Itanium, which lacks a volume OS and ISV portfolio (and no, saying "Linux" doesn't count, you need a branded product name and version to which an ISV can qualify), is on this path.

So now, let me fall on my sword about Sun's microprocessor roadmap for the past few years. Unlike the late 90's, where Sun had a commanding performance lead, starting in early 2001, we couldn't claim we were satisfying step 2 of the two steps above - for many tasks, our older UltraSPARC chips weren't faster than IBM's Power5 (or Intel's Xeon). Luckily, we had an extraordinarily high volume operating system in Solaris, along with a big community of ISV's and software supporters who filled in our gaps. Yes, we lost share, but we still ship billions in servers a year.

The saving grace for Sun was that customers could run Solaris on x86 and x64 platforms. (In fact, I was with a big bank yesterday doing a very cool deployment of Solaris on Dell systems). Customers have a choice. Proving we encourage the choice, during that period, we added AMD's Opteron to our product family (read THIS!), and are now among the fastest growing x86/64 vendors out there (we've gone from something like 99th in the market, to being the 6th largest vendor, with #4 in our crosshairs). Customers also found the transition to Red Hat Linux to be an option - which thankfully kept them on Unix, and is now simplifying the transition back to Solaris.

But IBM's recent Power5+ announcement was odd - in that what we were expecting wasn't what IBM delivered.

Granted, I didn't get invited to IBM's P5+ roll-out. I was expecting yet another of IBM's periodic, methodical improvements. Something similar to the 2002 upgrade from POWER4 to POWER4+ - in which they executed flawlessly to increase speed, lower cost and power consumption. They did everything they could to make the chip work better at less cost. And that's what initiated a very tough period for Sun.

But the newly announced POWER5+ seemed anti-climactic - no higher frequencies. No improvements to memory. Not even a reduction in power consumption (making the POWER name, with oil at $70/barrel, particularly ironic). About the only tangible benefit listed for POWER5+ over POWER5 was a smaller die size - a manufacturing benefit for IBM.

The new POWER5+ is sitting today at the exact same performance point that the old POWER5 reached over a year ago. IBM has stood still - long enough to open a window of opportunity for Sun.

A few weeks before the P5+ announcement, we announced our own upgrade to our UltraSPARC IV processor. The new UltraSPARC IV+ is a completely revised design, which boasts a doubling of performance, a smaller die and lower power consumption. And unlike IBM, which is confining P5+ to a few of its low-end systems, we already have UltraSPARC IV+ rolled out across our entire line of mid-range and high-end servers.

And we're just getting going.

Real soon now (we've said January, but there is that holiday rush to think about), we'll be introducing our new Niagara-based product line. As I discussed a while back, Niagara is our internal code name for a radical shift in computing, and a redesign of SPARC. Niagara systems take the concept of dual core processors (with which most of you are familiar), and goes to an absolute extreme - building 8 cores, each capable of running 4 jobs simultaneously (4 threads), onto a single chip. Doing the math, we'll be delivering a 32-way chip, running 9.6GHz, which sips power (about 70 watts). On performance-per-watt metrics, we believe we'll be a factor of 5 better than what IBM just announced. A factor of 5.

The chip is built for Solaris, and built for the internet - for jobs like searching, web serving, video streaming or ripping through database transactions (we will be admittedly weak for bomb simulation). Niagara will run existing Solaris apps without recompilation - offering complete binary compatibility for the massive SPARC installed base, and a simple recompile to move from x64 (or vice versa). There will be nothing like it in the industry - and its arrival will give us the two strongest industry standard server lineups the market's ever seen.

But these things tend to go in 5 year cycles. Where we led in the late 90's, IBM exploited our weakness to lead until this year. And in short, the environment's right for another shift. SPARC was part of the first wave of RISC processors that dominated high-performance computing in the mid- and late-80's. In 1990, IBM introduced POWER, dominating until we introduced the first generation of our 64-bit UltraSPARC processors in 1995. Which dominated until IBM introduced their totally redesigned dual-core POWER4 in 2001, which dominated until this year. Now it looks like the pendulum is swinging back in our, and AMD's, favor - for a while.

Add in what Intel announced a few weeks back, with analysts predicting no recovery until 2009, and it appears SPARC and Opteron are set to lead the pack on 64-bit performance, on volume operating systems, and on giving customers the choice they want - until well into the future.

But returning to Step 1 above, the key trend to watch is Solaris's volume - as we transition from a company in which SPARC drives Solaris adoption, to one in which Solaris drives systems opportunity (x64 or SPARC). With Solaris blowing past 3.2 million licenses downloaded this week, 80% downloaded to non-Sun hardware, it's now effectively fueling awareness and demand.

And given those numbers, it's obviously helping out Intel's Xeon, too.

Now, about running it on POWER5+...

Posted on 10:06PM Nov 11, 2005 |

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Podcasts, Web 2.0, Tim O'Reilly, etc.

Thanks to everyone for feedback on my Churchill Club breakfast with Quentin Hardy (who, despite his picture here, has never worn a suit in my presence), you can find the audio here.

You can also download the podcast for the Web 2.0 panel Tim O'Reilly, Mitchell Baker and I did here.

Stay tuned for more of these. I'm excited to say I'll be hangin' with the JavaPosse, talking to Richard down under on I/O and re-connecting with Mr. O'Reilly in the coming weeks.

And thanks, James Governor, for sending this along - a view from the CEO of an airline suggesting that at some point, airfares will be free, subsidized, of course, by in-air services (gambling, commerce and advertising). What a clever idea...

Posted on 08:30PM Nov 04, 2005 |

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A Simple Future

About a year ago, I was interviewed by a well-spoken Asian journalist, who impressed me by the speed with which he was typing into his phone. No joke, he had a phone with a tiny keypad, and given how uncertain his PC internet environment was in India, he relied on connectivity via his GSM phone. And he did quite well at it - to the point that he ribbed his peers for lingering in the PC past. It's amazing how people adapt to constraints, as well as opportunity.

Now, phones aren't wonderful input devices - at least for 2000 word articles. They're not bad for text messages (or even a paragraph now and then), but there's nothing like a full sized keyboard and monitor to create documents. So I'd like to tell you about my computing environment, and give you an opportunity to think about the future of office productivity.

I'm sorry to admit my personal computer usage is a tad different than most folks. I don't have just one computer, I have about 5. Why? I like to keep up with where the industry's headed. I own a couple Macintoshes (everyone should), a SunRay, an Ultra 20 (dual booting Solaris/Debian), and a tiny travel laptop (Solaris/Windows), and of course, I'm typing this on a fancy (and hot) Ferrari Acer Solaris laptop.

Although that probably sounds like an embarassment of riches, it actually creates a few problems. I solved the cross platform office productivity problem a while back, running StarOffice/OpenOffice.org (granted, NeoOffice/J on my Mac), Firefox, Java and Thunderbird across all the platforms. I'm quite happy and productive. Interacting with PC users is no problem at all.

But I do run into problems, given my refusal to run a server in my home. Yes, I refuse to run a server. I know it's heresy for someone in my position (especially someone with 5+ desktops), but my view is regular users shouldn't run servers in their homes. Nor should everyday citizens run power generators, except when they live off grid. And given that I live on a grid, I let Yahoo! and Google and eBay and Sun and OpenTable run servers on my behalf. They do it far, far better than I (granted, that isn't a high bar).

But here's an interesting user problem, which should put what Sun announced today into context, and give you some insight into where we see the future of office productivity.

First, a member of my family gets a Microsoft Word document from her sister. This family member doesn't own MS Word, so she sends the document to me to revise on her behalf, and return via email.

I receive the document, convert from Microsoft's .doc to StarOffice's ODF format, edit, and save. To my local drive. On my fancy Ferrari laptop. Ooops. Why ooops?

Because then I get on a plane, and take a 6 hour flight to go visit customers, without my Ferrari laptop (I don't travel with it - I travel with the tiny one). When I land, my family member calls to tell me she needs the document sent immediately. Uh oh.

Do I ask my neighbor to give her the emergency key? Do I walk her through navigating boot partitions? No no no. What do I really want? Hold that thought.

The remarkable thing about office productivity is the breadth of functionality covered by products like OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office. Sadly, none of us uses more than 10% of the feature set - and yet none of us uses the same 10%. That certainly complicates migrating users. But there are a couple exceptions to the rule.

There are two features every Office user relies upon - neither of which have experienced much by way of innovation over the past decade, and both of which lend themselves well to solving the problem I outline above - a derivative of which has been experienced by every journalist on the planet. As I wrote a week or so ago, building a user base isn't about rewriting functionality that works well today, it's about identifying efficiencies and differentiation, and innovating to create value for consumers.

The two features every single user needs are: Save, and Open. So wouldn't it be interesting if rather than exploring your local file system on your local PC, the Save and Open panels simply looked to a network account on Sun's Grid? Shareable like any of the mainstream photo services are today? Or how about saving to that 2.5Gb allowance Google gave you in your GMail account? And wouldn't it be great if you could save to ODF, or translate to Microsoft Word, or generate a podcast or mp3 file - on the fly? From within any app?

That would certainly put into question why you'd want to shell out $500 for Microsoft's Office 12 when OpenOffice.org was free, cross platform, more innovative, and just more for your money. And enabled by the biggest names on the internet.

And the best part is Sun's Grid and Star or OpenOffice don't have to be rewritten - they just need to learn some very simple new tricks. And as one of the internet's brightest minds said last year around this time, simplicity is an awfully powerful weapon.

Posted on 10:32AM Nov 01, 2005 | Comments[1]

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