The Magic of SunRay

As a new employee at Sun Microsystems I signed up for the SunRay@Home program so I could get the same to my desktop at home that I have at work. It arrived by FedEx in a large box that included a new SunRay 270, a router, and a power strip.

I already have a fairly well equipped home office that includes uninterruptible power supplies and a gigabit LAN routed via DSL to the Internet, so I didn't even bother unpacking the router or the power strip. I just unpacked the SunRay 270 and plugged in the USB mouse and keyboard, the power cord, and an ethernet cable from my router.

When I powered it on, I was asked for a password that was supplied to me via email when I requested the unit. It did some thinking and all of a sudden, a login screen appeared asking for my username. This is the same login screen I see on my SunRay at work. Without entering anything, I inserted my Sun badge and was prompted for my screen saver password (again just as if I were at work). I entered my password and presto - my Solaris desktop appears - just as I had left it when I left work.

Now I know this is not new to the world but it is new to me. The whole idea of session portability, instant sign-on, and the security of non-local state is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. I had a feeling reminiscent of the first time I saw the internet on a Netscape browser. It was like science fiction becoming real. To me it was indistinguishable from magic.

I've been in the IT business long enough to have suffered through what I now see as the morass of desktop computing. Having multiple desktop machines at work and home and a laptop and server accounts to keep in sync has always been a kludge. Plus the risk of disk failures (I have had two significant failures) and ineffective backups has always seemed so intractable.

A long time ago if you wanted an answering machine for your phone, you had to buy one and install it at your house. Then the phone companies started offered voice messaging for a nominal fee. I remember thinking what an easy decision that was. I didn't want to manage my own messaging infrastructure. Now who has their own answering machine? Not many. The same will be true for desktop computing.

Now what I need to be ultimately productive is a SunRay laptop. This should be a device that has n-wifi, speakers, microphone, camera, DVD, USB ports, gigabit ethernet (for when I'm at my desk), and a huge battery. Think a MacBook Pro without the hard drive, Intel processor, and RAM. This unit would presumably get fantastic battery life because the power sucking components are gone. And even if you did need to change the battery, you wouldn't lose any productivity because of session persistence. I would also want a battery charger and few extra batteries so I could go non-stop when I'm untethered.

SunRays are the greatest thing since sliced bread and I hope Sun can capitalize on this technology to change desktop computing for good.

Posted at 07:29AM Mar 03, 2008 by Scott Lehman in Sun  |  Comments[0]

The Power of Free

I heard a great story the other day on NPR that oddly enough was related to Open Source Software. It was a story about behavioral economist Dan Ariely's new book 'Predictably Irrational'. Ariely's book offers a new explanation for our decision making processes that is contrary to traditional economic theory. He argues that our decision making processes are much more irrational than previously thought, influenced by emotions rather than hard economic reasoning.

One of Ariely's main discoveries is the power of free. What he found was that when the price of something is zero, it becomes irresistible to the consumer even in the face of other options that deliver logically better value. He uses as an example an experiment where children chose a small piece of chocolate for free rather than a much larger piece of chocolate for nominal fee even when the children were given the funds to pay the fee (in this case the currency was chocolate kisses).

For open source software companies this finding is a powerful vindication of their business model. Ariely's theories suggest that software customers are predisposed to prefer a product that is free even if it is not the best. We see that every day in open source software. Open source software is often not feature compatible with or as polished as commercial alternatives. But as we have seen over the past 10 years, free software has made incredible inroads in the software business. Consumers are willing to make accommodations and allowances for something if they can get it for free.

The challenge for open source software vendors is to find a way to monetize software in different ways that deliver real and perceived value after free software has been adopted. In addition to service and support, new business models might include advertising, creating dynamic marketplaces, and selling the knowledge that makes software intelligent.

Every software developer I know likes to eat. So it is important to make money developing open source software. As Sun takes xVM open source, we are trying hard to create sustainable business models that complement the delivery of free software.

Tags: openxvm, foss, open source, free

Posted at 06:40AM Mar 03, 2008 by Scott Lehman in Sun  |  Comments[0]