The Navel of Narcissus

Hey, I work for Sun. But you knew that. I want to talk about my SunRay and why it is so cool. And why a SunRay is like a TiVo.

What's a SunRay?

A SunRay is an ultra-thin client desktop system. Let's unpack that a bit. It's thin because software doesn't run on it -- that all runs on the server to which the SunRay is attached, which also explains why it is called a client. And it sits on my desk. There are several models, but mine looks like this:

The SunRay itself is the funky little guy in the foreground. It has a slot in it for me to insert my JavaCard, which has multiple uses at Sun -- it opens doors on our campuses and also identifies me to SunRay systems.

What's so Cool?

What's cool is that I can walk into my office, stick my JavaCard into the SunRay and keep working where I left off last time. OR I can walk into the office next door to show something to a coworker by sticking my card in his SunRay and bringing up the same session. If I need to do something from a conference room -- same deal -- just pop the card in the conference room SunRay and keep working.

Right now this nifty trick works within a Sun campus, but the vision is that I be able to jump on a plane and have my session accessible to me from any Sun campus. Or even from home. How cool is that?

And speaking of cool. The SunRay doesn't have any fans in it -- it is totally silent. I didn't appreciate that feature until my Ultra 60 workstation had been carted away and replaced by the SunRay. Silence -- what a great way to think.

There are other important aspects of this model from a business viewpoint, probably chief among them the massively reduced total cost of ownership you get from having software environments (OS, applications, etc) centrally installed on the server rather than on each and every desktop machine. Important, but that's not why I'm blogging about my desktop machine. Wow, I'm blogging about my desktop machine.

SunRays and TiVo

So why is Tivo like SunRay? Because no one has figured out how to adequately market either product to effectively communicate their value. In both cases, actually having one to play with can make the sale pretty quickly because the technology is appealing at such a gut level. But that doesn't scale.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but there are a lot of people out there who would benefit from either of these technologies -- if we could just figure out the right way to enlighten them.

Comments:

How to do mass education on just how Sun Rays are so cool? Hmm, it is a tricky one. Some ideas: (*) Get a really large deployment at a customer that's a house-hold name as a general fat client replacement, and milk that for all it's worth. (*) Get Apple to design a drop-dead cool version (*) Get it into a movie plot, somehow, and hope the script writers can grasp the idea and come up with a good plot. (*) Go hard for the low-hanging fruit. Not just security for government/military. Get the enviromentalists on board with it's super-silent operation, minimal resource use (much less resource intensive to make than PCs), long life-span (doesn't need to get junked every few years), low power. If the enviromentalists like it, they'll start advertising it for you. (*) Actually do some normal advertising? I don't think I've ever seen Sun Rays in ads. Some well done 1 minute ads could work perhaps.

Posted by Chris Rijk on June 16, 2004 at 07:34 PM EDT #