Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

Line

The line to get into the keynote session stretches from the front of Moscone North around the corner, past the Metreon and up toward Market Street. Ran into Michael "Mac" McCarthy, founding editor of SunWorld and JavaWorld magazines, who swore it looked like the queue for a Giants home game. Fortunately, Rick Cattell and I ran into Scott (yes, that Scott) and we tailed him into the keynote.

Swag

New logo color compliant Java cup, and Happy Birthday pins. Way cool swag. Luggage tags in the official swag kit aren't bad either.

Open

Only 20 minutes late, modulo getting everyone seated that's close enough to an on-time start. Gage encourages everyone to meet someone new, not sit with friends or co-workers (of course, the front row has Scott, James, Jonathan, and my boss, Johnny L). To incent (and incite) personal contact, Gage makes us all honorary Brazilians (amid much cheering).

Flash

Jonathan takes the stage and suddenly it's halftime at the Super Bowl. There are more flashes than a Texas thunderstorm, not just from the press and analysts seated behind me but from the other 7,000+ people in the main tent. Jonathan invokes Thomas Edison in his view of how technology has affected society -- nice props for work done in West Orange, NJ.

Play

Nishimura-san from Panasonic took the stage to demonstrate a Blu-Ray disc player. Blu-ray has an interactivity layer on top of the high-definition video layer, and the interactivity is provided through Java - specifically J2ME CDC. One of the things we posited at the first Java Day in New York, back in 1995, has become a reality - Java is the pre-eminent platform for networked, interactive entertainment.

Get In The Game

Jonathan announces a renewed partnership with IBM, and the keyboards behind me go wild. Johnny announced the availability of our server side Java implementation as an open source project Glassfish.

Wrapping up the first session, James Gosling brought up the first T-shirt hurling contest finalist, engineered by a team from El Salvador. Gosling then re-en-Gaged, along with Scott, and we were treated to birthday cake and a visit from the royal Duke. Press and photographers went most wild for the set of stunts, proving that the whole point of participation is to have fun.

Opening day of JavaOne for me, and I got to enjoy one of the perks of my gig as Software CTO: host the annual Fireside Chat for JavaOne conference alumni. My role was merely that of moderator and provider of filler material while waiting for the meatier questions from the audience.

Our panel included Onno Kluyt, of the JCP Program; Graham Hamilton, VP and Sun Fellow in the Java Platform Group; Tim Lindholm, Distinguished Engineer working (currently) on J2ME and VP and Sun Fellow James Gosling.

It's really late body time, and tomorrow is the first of many insanely busy days, but here are some vignettes from the questions asked that stuck with me (it helped that I brought a pen and some of those little phone message cards from the hotel):

• Gaming is big. Questions about Sun's gaming server, the existence of a JVM for the PlayStation (one attendee remembers Sony making this promise) and real-time Java certainly got our attention.
• Java is a critical part of the new economics of software that separate distribution and compensation. Seems like a perennial question regards Sun's commitment to Java if we don't publicly extoll how much money we're making from Java. We're committed to Java -- Graham Hamilton nearly leaped from his comfy fireside chair to emphatically state the facts. Java in handset devices is a large distribution vehicle.
• While we joked about it, tape has its place in the Java world. I kidded Graham Hamilton about a Java Tape Object, providing very long term persistence; James Gosling mentioned that a Turing machine (with some infinitely long tape) was one possible ideal target for a Java virtual machine; but then we had a serious tape scenario. An attendee asked about Jini and JXTA and how we might use dynamic discovery to allow a Bluetooth enabled device to dump its contents to a tape archive device if one is discovered.

Following the intimate chat with a few hundred of our attendees, it was off to catch the tail end of the NetBeans Day reception, stick my head into O'Reilly reception, and then sneak off for a "real" dinner.

JavaOne backpacks now outpace all other branded merchandise in the immediate Moscone environs. It's going to be a fun few days.

The Figure

That's Willie Stargell in action figure form, posing in front of this blog entry under construction. I'm not a big collector of any kind of action figures, but when your boyhood idol comes out in the Kenner 4-inch form factor, sometimes you have to bend the rules. And now Stargell's batting pose is a diversion from long concalls to short term writer's block.

Every now and then I get around to posting something to Number 8, my baseball oriented blog hosted on mlb.com. I started it to capture some of my happy hardball memories, many of which involved Willie Stargell.

The Family

About 6 weeks after my first posting, a comment appeared in one of the entries thanking me for writing nice words about Stargell, the commentor's uncle. An email conversation followed, in which I learned about memorabilia saved by Willie Stargell's niece, including one of the stars emblazoned with an 8 and handed out to fans. I'm jaded by having to buy tickets to get a Hall of Famer's autograph and the desultory efforts of some players to engage the fan base, but in his time Willie Stargell actively handed out swag. He was also one of the first players to truly bridge the player diversity in the late 70s; on Stargell's team "We Are Family" was more than their theme song. Stargell built community, one player, one fan, one star at a time.

The Fan Out

I'm touched that his niece took the time to write back, to share more stories about the man who was my first sports hero, and the original number 8 in my book. Stargell's niece continues in the good example set by her uncle, building an informed community just one email at a time.

While shopping for sneakers at the local Dick's Sporting Goods, my 11-year old son had a life experience that imitated my writing the hagiography of Saint Patrik. With my wife supervising the sneaker outfitting, she noticed a six-foot plus tall man, with long blond hair, asking my son if he liked a particular brand. "Who's the surfer dude?" she asked, only to get the reply through gritted teeth "He's Patrik Elias". No "NJ Devils" surname needed with our family.

What do I interpret from a 60 second conversation between an ice hockey star and his young fan? First and foremost, Elias is feeling better if he's buying sneakers. Devils fans throughout NJ emitted a Springsteen-like collective howl when we heard of Patrik's bout with Hep A.

Number two, hockey fans everywhere hold your breath. There's hope for a hockey season. Patrik spent the past year in the Czech republic and Russia, playing hockey, but he's back where the NHL takes him. Buying sign for Devils tickets?

Last, but most important, Elias is one of the most genuinely nice guys in a sport where the athletes are distinguished by their (off ice) genuine niceness. It's one thing to sign autographs and make small talk when approached; it's another to start a conversation with a young adult because you wear the same sneakers. Fill the NHL - or any other league - with guys like Elias and you'll have a fan base for the next two decades.

My son's only regret from his less than 15 minutes of fame encounter? He didn't get to tell Patrik about the ever-growing pasteboard empire we've assembled in his honor, or tell him we're glad he's back to full strength, or remind him that they share the same birthday.

Perhaps we're so used to thinking of the questions that we'd ask a person we admire that we're caught off-guard when the conversation is reversed. Here's the interesting question - if the one person who appears in your school essays about sportsmanship, leadership, and role models starts asking you questions, will your own answers make you proud?

Our historical models for commerce and corporations rely heavily on the notion that distribution and compensation happen at the same time. Buy a software package, you get the license keys (or the installation CD) at the time and/or place of purchase. Buy an audio CD or a DVD, and the goods and money are exchanged at the point of retail distribution. A variety of economic literature exists looking at how and why corporations exist in this model, primarily arguing that corporations lower the transactional cost of commerce. Ronald Coase won a Nobel Prize for this work, and it makes sense -- the companies most efficient at creating products make money; the companies like Wal-Mart most efficient at distributing products also make money.

What happens when distribution and compensation are not tied? What is the economic model for broad, widely accessible distribution with compensation derived from places other than the point of sale? The model isn't so foreign in the consumer space -- this is how pre-paid phone cards work (the wide distribution of phones creates a market) and it's how musicians get compensated for having their music played on broadcast radio. The ASCAP/BMI royalty system charges radio stations a "tax" based on their financials, and the royalties are distributed to artists based on a sampling of what's been played. Distribution is free and wide, compensation happens periodically with statistical models for a true-up of the sing to ka-ching to bling cycle.

Now modulate the accepted commerce models by a low-cost, ubiquitous and high-bandwidth set of networks, one of which is the wireless service I'm consuming sitting in Newark Airport at this early hour. The Internet provides a distribution channel that is significantly lower cost than any real-world retail channel, and with greater reach, greater precision, and greater transparency than the tiered worlds of planes, cranes and country song refrains (about truck drivers). If you can represent your product as bits -- music, movies, images, software, advice, contracts, endorsements -- the notion that you'd tie compensation to distribution is flawed.

The beauty of the broad penetration of Internet distribution is that it fosters the creation of communities of interest. This is what makes eBay tick; it's what makes open source projects work. The primary driver for creating open source software is to create a broad distribution. No different than the wireless companies giving away "free" handsets that are locked to their phone services.

Compensation is independent of distribution in this world. If you want to monetize open source projects, you can charge for their support (viz. Red Hat), create value-add on top of the distribution (a la Oracle's database running on Linux), or create additional services of interest to the community that are related to the distribution (like Sun's compute grid and the Sun Developer Network). Economic models are just as Coase-y in this world -- the companies best at driving down transaction costs for delivering value-add or servicing the needs of the community will thrive.

The bottom line is that open source software isn't a product, it's a mechanism -- it creates distributions. How companies monetize the distribution will depend on how well they address the care and feeding of the community. The transactional sales compensation model for a lot of bits is declining (despite the protests of the major media players, despite the fact that they've benefitted from the "alternative" non-point of sale models like ASCAP and BMI for decades). Welcome to the world of broad distribution.

And today it has a new player: OpenSolaris. Nearly 1,000 pages of content have been provided via blogs.sun.com, kick-starting that care and feeding process.

Hello, world.

In the weeks leading up to the public unveiling of OpenSolaris, I've had many heated conversations about how software development is and will be affected by large-scale open source projects. There are no golden rules or absolute truths here; for every example I provide there are counter examples, which simply means that innovation is hard to predict.

The underlying question for these discussions came from customer queries about OpenSolaris: If we open source our precious operating system, what will we do next? The answer is what it has been for 23 years -- we'll keep inventing new things. The reason is that Sun, like any technology company with a reasonable R&D budget, expects results from the investment in basic research. The "R" component funds new ideas in operating systems, performance, networking, and interoperability. I call this initial innovation. Not just improvements to existing systems, but fundamentally big new things like Dtrace. Because the number of world-class basic computer science researchers is small, and because most of them like to work in funded companies or universities, quite a bit of the initial innovation comes from those same places. This is not peculiar to computer scientists or chip designers; it's true for brain surgeons and drug researchers and other initial inventors.

If you're a brain surgeon, the initial innovation from the major teaching centers is shared in journals and conferences; the rest of the grey matter world can them improve, implement and fine-tune the methods and procedures that come out of the labs. This is the "D" part of R&D, taking an idea and developing it into a product with market stamina. I call this incremental innovation, and it's just as critical and important as the intial innovation, but it happens on a larger scale, in more distributed fashion, and often more informally. Every time you go to see a doctor who keeps up with his or her field, you're (silently) thankful for incremental innovation.

What if you're a software developer? There are ample opportunities for incremental innovation in the operating system, web infrastructure and dynamic language areas. This doesn't imply that initial innovation can't ever come from the community; surely languages like perl prove the point. One or a few developers will always be capable of developing a critical mass of game-changing software, but the bulk of initial innovation is likely to come from funded "R" at companies like Sun and Microsoft and universities with computer sciences programs. With that innovation being opened to developer communities, more of the "D" will be driven by incremental innovation on top of the open source distribution of those initially interesting bits. Even if you're not a rocket scientist, you can at least emulate a brain surgeon.

So what's next for Sun after OpenSolaris? More innovation. More community involvement. More development. How will Sun remain competitive in the operating system space once the source code is opened up? Same way we have - more innovation. How will the users benefit? From more innovation on that source base, whether it's dozens of incremental improvements or a few large-bore clever ideas. Today's event isn't the terminal point, it's the first point in the trajectory of several innovation paths.

Thanks to Bryan Cantrill, Solaris Kernel Engineer, Claire Giordano, aforementioned queen of OpenSolaris things, and Patrick Kerpan, CTO of Borland, for their thoughts, cajoling and insights in this area. Yes, CTOs can be non-confrontational and share ideas, but if we resort to calling each other "doctor" it's usually not with a straight face.

Logic is a funny thing when modulated by the trade press and marketing. We are used to dealing with simple statements in which one predicate is either true or false because there's a singular definition of "true" for the question that has been phrased. Either I'm wearing a red shirt or I'm not wearing a red shirt. Unless you debate the definition of "red" and "shirt", this one is pretty clear. Logicians refer to this as the law of excluded middle and that works fine provided you can be clear about your definitions of truth.

The middle ground excluded by nice, clean logic reappears when there are several possible true states "in between" the two extremes posited in your reasoning. And this is why some of the publicly promoted logic surrounding Sun, open source, OpenSolaris, and Linux has been so flawed. "Sun has open sourced Solaris, so it must hate Linux" is equivalent to "Either Sun does OpenSolaris or it embraces Linux". The flaw here is that the excluded middle in that (highly flawed) preposition contains a variety of other truths, involving Sun endorsing - through support, sales, and source code contribution - a variety of operating system platforms.

Opening the source code for Solaris doesn't mean we dismiss Linux. Using the CDDL license doesn't mean Sun finds the GPL distasteful or wrong. Starting today, there's a world in which OpenSolaris and Linux (and the Apache Foundation and now the Fedora Foundation) represent multiple, independent points of truth. No excluded middle. CDDL, GPL (and MPL and APL and BSD licensing) exist as multiple truths in a twisty maze of legal passages. These are ecologies; they exist in nature, in communities of practice in medicine, and in electronic form.

Ecologies stimulate evoluation -- innovation in our technical world. I'd rather have multiple, vibrant communities of operating systems and the legal eagles governing their distribution than a world with one dominant OS be it Windows, Linux or any other Unix variant. Variety isn't just the spice of life, it's a critical ingredient for its evolution.

Starting today, any average developer can access the OpenSolaris distribution. The middle ground isn't shrinking or excluded; it's just about to be invented.

I like my Dunkin' Donuts coffee every morning, sometimes in the afternoon, always on an evening road trip (but, to quote Steve Martin, never at dusk). I'm not a coffee snob; I like iced black Dunkies coffee. This poses something of a problem on road trips, in that the Dunkies density varies in direct proportion to your distance from Randolph, Massachusetts (the hallowed home of Dunkin Donuts corporate and the mystical Donut University). As you drive up and to the right on your United States map, you run into a lot of Dunkin' Donuts shops; go west of Chicago and you're out of luck.

When coffee consumption borders on addiction, and brand preference borders on a (mental) health issue, you get good at finding your Dunkies. Island of Aruba - five Dunkin' Donuts shops. Route 1A in the Fort Lauderdale environs - good to go. I-95 in northern Maryland only has one within a 5-minute detour of the highway. Yes, I spend a lot of time preparing for a trip by checking out dunkindonuts.com and planning my coffee breaks. West of Chicago, no luck. O'Hare Airport is the western frontier of the pink and orange logo.

This week's trip to Boston was nirvana. My flight from Newark deposited me at Logan airport on time, and despite forgetting that the Mass Pike does not have an Back Bay exit when you're headed westbound, I managed to find a parking place, my meeting location, and a brand-new Dunkin' Donuts all within 2 blocks. In celebration of their customers, the new shop was giving out free small coffees, discounted sweetened coffee drinks, and had a body puppet coffee cup dancing around on Stuart Street. I also checked out the shop in Woburn (on my way to a meeting outside the 495 beltway), and one in Terminal C at Logan Airport.

Is there a point, you ask? Several, actually.

When in doubt, ask people who are likely to drink a lot of coffee. Parking lot attendants, security guards, and police officers know their Dunkies. What you learned in Kindergarten is true; these people are the coffee drinker's friends in strange cities.

Dunkies fans are part of a far-flung but quiet community. Our coffee is simple, and amazingly consistent. You have something in common with that person in front of you in line.

When without, improvise. Carry coffee filters and the small 2-serving vacuum packs of Dunkin Donuts grounds with you, and you have your personal Dunkies valet in any hotel room.

How does Dunkin' Donuts introduce new, competitive products at reasonable prices? Supply chain management. Sprinkles optimization (no, I'm not kidding). Running effective trucking routes so that stores get frozen muffins in the proper cadence. There is no great IT without coffee; there is no great coffee without IT.

I've received all sorts of email about Sun's acquisition of Storage Tek, ranging from the congratulatory to the incredulous. Aside from the financials of the deal, which Jonathan captured nicely, the technology rounds out our complement of data center storage solutions. Not storage "products" as in "persist this piece of data" but "solutions" as in "persist this piece of data even if the data center building happens to be visited by rising flood waters."

My appreciation for the STK deal starts with the network physics: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." Frequently used in talks by Andrew Tanenbaum, it's also in his Computer Networks book. When you're dealing with bulk data transfer and multiple (required) locations, tape is good.

Storage is a hierarchy in time and space. It's not all disk or disk cache or optical; there's a spectrum of latency that fills the time axis. The space axis covers capacity as well as location. As long as natural disasters, mechanical wear, and government regulation remain real world factors, every enterprise needs to keep its data in more than one place, and usually in more than one medium. Tape is good.

Yes, customers in time-sensitive business like investment banking require completely synchronized redundant data centers, and they'll have disk to disk replication in place. You still want tape backups, to provide a longer-term data memory and possibly provide an insurance of last resort if there's corruption introduced into one of the primary sources. Data corrupts, and absolute data corruption corrupts absolutely, while thoroughly ruining your system administration staff's weekend.

This need for less speed (but more capacity at a good price) is going to affect the consumer market. Online backups of your digital pictures? How about your iTunes library? Latency matters less than certainty in this case. If I'm going to trust a third party with my personal bits, they had better be available to me for as long as I'm paying the bill. I've gotten to the point where various family records - financial, photographic, video, and audio - exist only on disk. I'm less than comfortable with this, even though I perform regular backups, because the backups are located in the same physical location as the primary media. Tape is good, offsite tape is better.