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

You know it's been a long week at work when you begin making jokes about computability and algorithmic complexity. You know it's truly a bad week when you do it twice, and in public. The first instance was when I told my chief of staff that we should do a little up-front work before a joint staff meeting. "If we don't know what's in their knapsack we'll never be done," perhaps a bit too oblique reference to the knapsack problem, a computing problem that sits underneath a few crypto algorithms because of its complexity. It was a lossy join of NP-complete and scheduling references, because my intent was to find a way to get up from the (staff) relational table in bounded time, because nobody laughed.

Faced with the prospect that that the only algorithmic complexity reference I might sneak in this week was that my jokes are of weak strength, I came up with another obscure proposal for the Technology Panel seating pattern at this year's Sun Analyst Conference. Last year I had tossed out using Erdos numbers, but that had the disadvantage of putting me on the end of the panel. Last night I suggested that we seat the business unit CTOs in increasing order of complexity, as indicated by the algorithms most closely related to their personalities or work products.

Before dismissing this as the idle work of someone with insufficient staff action items, consider the implicit information conveyed by such a seeding: Mike Splain, CTO of the Scalable Systems Group, goes first because he's a limit() kind of guy. Limit as in provide focus, align architectures and resolve to an answer. Mark Tremblay is next as his algorithm is patent++: 100 issued patents and still incrementing. Jim Mitchell, Sun Fellow and leader of some of our advanced development projects, is captured by while 1 { research; }. Whit goes to the other end of the bench this year, since he's Mr. Knapsack.

It was funny for a while, and then it turned into the iso-hose algorithm: If my evangelism role has me represented by the travelling salesman problem, I'm computationally intractable, and last in the panel. Again.

The Register has an intriguing article from the weekend highlighting HP's intent to compete with Sun by supporting Solaris. HP's website contains a list of Solaris configurations support by HP. In HP's view, this will help them migrate customers away from Sun. Using Sun's technology.

Huh? Seems more like potential Sun market expansion. Here's why: Software architectures live a long time. A very long time. TCP/IP, http, XML, SOAP, Java, Solaris. Some are protocols expressed as software, some are platforms for expressing software. The youngest among them is five years old. The oldest pre-dates our recent college hires.

Quick: find a piece of hardware in your office, in your briefcase, in your house, more than five years old (hardware in the computing sense, not hardware in the silverware sense). Within six feet of me right now are a Palm Tungsten T (the oldie in the group), a Mac running OS X, a Toshiba laptop running OpenSolaris (build 25), a ready-for-decommissioning Sony PC running Windows, and a cell phone with a web browser. The Palm and Vaio PC are 27 months old. Everything else I've had less than a year. Lots of hardware diversity, but lots of software compatibility. Once you choose your software platform(s), you tend to upgrade the hardware underneath, as time, money and features allow. As long as you don't change the software architectures.

I love expanding markets.

Evan Marcus is my co-author on the High Availability book and creator of the rather fun Bill Gates net worth page. He knows a few things about statistics, having grown up (and into) a nerdy baseball fan. I can call Evan nerdy because he and I have co-published, and Evan has shared some serious insight into the statistics about our book, which is where this long tale is going.

Technical book sales are in the toilet. Individual technical books just aren't doing the volume they did a few years ago. During the dot-com boom, expensing a few hundred dollar online spree at fatbrain.com wasn't such a big deal. Today, we're lucky if we see a few hundred book sales per royalty statement, versus a few thousand when the HA book was first released. The exponential drop-off in sales happened inside of a year. I hear from tech publishers (the three I talk to more than twice a year) that book sales stink like old cheese right now. And after watching NBC's Dateline on supermarket cleanliness last night, I believe old cheese has a better chance of moving.

So why aren't the real world bookstores devoting less shelf space to technical books? My gut reaction is that even though individual sales are down, overall sales are probably about flat due to the larger number of titles being issued. Total titles are fueled by total topics; when you work in a fast-changing arena you create opportunity in the derivative markets.

This is a classic long tail, popularized by Chris Anderson of Wired magazine. Even technical "best sellers" slide down the distribution curve, taking up place under the long tail. The long tail in technology books is created by the multiplicative effect of patches, upgrades, new languages, new operating systems, new architectures and the socialization of technology.

Here's the problem: I think the number of people who are willing to shell out $30 or $50 for a technical book is going down. Leading indicator is when there is a thriving used-book business in your title on amazon.com. It's not just corporations that frown upon expensing books (don't get me started on the state of "training", usually the first thing to disappear when the belt tightens). The long tail is occupied by books that bobsledded down that slippery slope from "best seller" to "amazon.com only" very quickly. Why pay for an entire book when (a) you're probably just looking for an answer to an immediate question, (b) you can Google faster than using an index and trying to guess how the publisher's editor categorized your query and (c) free or cheap beats ten large Dunkin' Donuts ice coffees worth of content.

What we're going to see is the iTunes-ization of technical content.

Content by the slice, located through search engines, paid for by subscriptions, advertising, and PayPal. Google and amazon.com have hinted at this direction for months. Here's my pricing prediction: Technical content will go the way of the New York subway token - priced the same as a slice of pizza. System administrator fuel of all types should enjoy consistency in pricing.

I believe this long-tail monetization may eventually smother technical publishing as we know it, and that creates a problem: how many times do you learn something new by searching for an answer, as opposed to reading a book and uncovering a question you didn't previously ask? The challenge for technical publishers is to find a variety of models that allow authors to be compensated, make new book projects promising and financially interesting, and to reach the highly fragmented, appropriate audiences that represent the long tail.

This doesn't mean that techinical publishing is dead. Far from it. I think Tim O'Reilly gets it (Disclaimer: the NFS book is an O'Reilly title with my name sharing spine space). It means that the barriers to entry and to exit need to change. The barrier to entry is obvious -- technical books have list prices of $25 to $60. Print a book for $10 and you can test the elasticity of demand. Self-publishing houses like iUniverse do exactly this, optimizing for making money on a tiny print run instead of monetizing the first print run at what the market might bear (Disclaimer again: I've already started talking to iUniverse about the hockey book, because I think I can self-promote it better than a classic publisher).

Self-publishing prices to the cost of production, not market demand, so it's insensitive to miniscule demand. What you want if you optimize for the long tail. What amazon.com benefits from. Reducing the barrier to entry makes technical book publishing accessible to anyone with some good ideas and a blog. Same model used by emergent bands that promote themselves entirely through MySpace (props to Cory Doctorow for the forward pointer on that).

The barrier to exit is the tricky one, because it requires that today's "classic" publishers realize that their content is best suited for search, print on demand, sales by the page or by the chapter, or simply as free content that drives readers to other paid content, advertising or promotions. I would love to be able to put pages of the HA book in blogs, or on Sun's BigAdmin site for system administrators, because it would drive awareness and possibly readership. The "exit" I'm referring to is the exit from the business model that precludes me from putting up pages or chapters of the book (the publisher can do it, and has done it, but typically only as part of an early phase marketing plan or when they're compensated).

Because our publisher monetized the first print runs of the book (before it slipped into the long tail), and because they can now do print on demand and make money from small print runs, there's no incentive for the publisher to release the copyright, to effectively open source the book and try out some dual-licensing models, or to rekindle interest in an area (making networked systems more reliable) that has suffered since the dot-com bust made training uncool. So the content is trapped: can't be re-used, can't be widely distributed, and can't be monetized except through whole book sales. Without an exit strategy, it's going to be smothered, and while the publisher can monetize the long tail in the aggregate, there's very little incentive for authors to create more content to fit that model.

I have analysts on the brain right now as we prepare for the annual Sun Analysts Conference, which wraps up January and opens February in San Francisco. Analysts are valued for their industry insight, validating decisions, and sometimes making predictions about the future.

Back in November, I intimated that maybe Petr Nedved wasn't a permanent in Phoenix, perhaps electing to play closer to his fashion coach and lifetime teammate (that would be his wife) rather than his fashionable former teammate (that would be Wayne Gretzky) turned coach. Nedved got traded to Philaldelphia on Thursday.

If only predicting the future was so easy.

Still in the halo of my Doctorow breakfast yesterday, today I received a pointer to a podcast of Cory's short story Craphound. It's a great reading of a great story; it's the story that turned me from mild fan into sincere fanatic. It's Garrison Keillor with aliens. It's the best reminder of my childhood in future past. As a collector of cards, jerseys, books, pins, coins, cables, tools (hand, power and software), business cards, wind-up toys, pens, postcards, things with Steve Howe, and mis-matched socks (not intentionally), I have always been a craphound.

If you've ever heard me talk, in conference or via conference call, you know that I'm a huge, huge fan of Cory Doctorow. In addition to being one of the editors of boingboing, he's a world-class, new-breed sci-fi writer, more focused on social issues and the socialization of technology (gotta love it) than on inventing science to forward his political agenda. Not that he doesn't have a political agenda, of course, but you can see yourself fitting into his vision of the future without having to first wait for faster than light travel or parallel universes to appear.

"Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom," his first book, is my basis for asserting that trust and reputation aren't the same thing, and that we should re-evaluate how we build "secure systems" using that premise. "Eastern Standard Tribe," book two, is the paradigm for how and why technology fractures us, or could unite us. It might have been written by Bono in 2018, except he'll be on the U2 reunion tour. And "Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town," Cory's third book, is just something you have to experience. I've decided that it's about families that suffer from stereotypes taken to the stereotypical extreme. Somewhat. But if you can envision the stereotypical Jewish mother as a washing machine, you'll get it. If you can't, well, read the book anyway.

Thanks to Tim Bray, a scheduling coincidence at ApacheCon, some mutual introductions and Cory's trip east, I got to enjoy breakfast with him today. Big fun stuff on an otherwise rainy day in New York City.

We talked about collecting things that we don't need, but like. We touched on teenagers and their use of technololgy. We spent most of our time talking about Digital Rights Management, licensing, GPLv3, and how ideas spread. And how rights protection may impair open source projects. Cory is insanely anti-DRM, which seems strange on the surface because he makes his entire living from content. But you can find all of his works covered by a Creative Commons license, creating a broader set of venues for their interpretation and appreciation. Ideas spread through means other than those controlled by rights management technology, which mostly serves to restrict flow rather than accelerate it.

One of my favorite games to play is "If PersonX was alive today, what would he (or she) be doing?" For example, if Mozart lived in the 21st century, he'd be more likely to be a kernel hacker than a professional musician, or maybe he'd do both. If Thomas Jefferson lived today, he'd be hacking hardware to eliminate DRM schemes. And if Cory Doctorow lived in the 18th century, he'd be Thomas Jefferson. A time warp worthy of good sci-fi. And a morning that left my brain with wings.

Dan Berg is in forbes.com and Prague, Czech Republic. Almost at the same time.

Dan is the CTO of our Services division, another long-term Sun employee, and another former Systems Engineer who became a Distinguished Engineer. He's been in front of a series of trends, from jumping on the Java train early on to creating patterns to defining how an architecture-focused consulting business would (and still does) operate at Sun.

In his interview Dan covers two of the biggest geographic displacements that are affecting IT shops worldwide. First, smart people are distributed, and will remain distributed. Sun has worldwide engineering offices, and we are trying to develop career paths that diverge outside of California. It's not just enough to hire people in Bangalore, Prague, St. Petersburg and Beijing, they have to be full-fledged members of the technical staff. At a developers conference a year ago, someone asked me how Sun regulated the quality of our engineering efforts that are "off shore." My two-part answer was that since all of our non-US employees are Sun employees, I'm not sure what boundary was implied by "shore,", and further our engineers are expected to follow our development frameworks, design reviews, product lifecycles and architecture review processes regardless of ZIP or country code.

If that's our expectation, we have a responsibility as technology leaders to develop leadership bench strength in all of our geographies as well. That's why Dan Berg is moving to Prague - to take his collected experience as a Distinguished Engineer, software developer, services leader, start-up veteran, and former Texan to a major software engineering center. We'll see how long the Texas part lasts; I'm betting he trades 'horns for beaks within a month.

In addition to geographic independence of our engineers, we're also striving for geographic independence of software. Call it utility computing, call it IT as a service or software as a service, the bottom line is that you'll consume software over the network, without worrying about data center locations. Do you really know where Google is? Or eBay? Or the data center that routes text messages to your cell phone? When we talk about delivering IT as a service, that's what we mean. All you care about is reliability, quality of service, security, privacy, and consistency in time and space. Location is so 1990s.

So where in the world is Dan Berg? Blogging along his (e-)world tour.

More specifically, I'm the rw-rw-rw- web. It's only funny until I get more eBay feedback.

In the interests of keeping blogs.sun.com more Sun-focused, I'm taking the hockey content over to my personal web site, where I'll be tracking the hockey book, hockey happenings, and watching the wheels fall off the Rangers' Zamboni (we hope).

Imagine this: It's 1989. The Cold War is still "hot" while US-Soviet relations are, well, cold. You're a 20-year old hockey player who secretly flies to Buffalo, New York, because the year before some men in business suits took a wild chance on you. You fear for your life, for your parents' lives, you don't speak English and your #23 Russian Army hockey jersey seems more than half a globe away. You are Alexander Mogilny, the first Russian hockey player in the NHL.

We frequently think of our sports heros as brave for playing through pain, or for orchestrating come-from-behind victories, but we don't always associate sports with life-and-death decisions. 89 became Alex Mogilny's sweater number because it was the year he defected, ending up in Buffalo since the team had drafted him a year before. He established a precedent that brought other Soviet and Soviet bloc players to the NHL, showing that not only was it possible to play but to learn English, adapt culturally (Mogilny learned to play golf), and thrive. In 1993 he became the first Russian player named captain of an NHL team.

Mogs scored over 1,000 points in just under 1,000 games. A point a game is impressive over a few seasons, but he did it for more than 15 years. His name is on the Stanley Cup, won with the Devils in 99-00, and in 02-03 he was awarded the Lady Byng Trophy for the most gentlemanly play on the ice. Hockey is a contact sport, and Mogilny's hip had been flaring up on him, limiting his play the last few seasons.

Tonight the Devils put Mogilny on waivers. It's not a complete surprise as Mogs has been in the doghouse lately. Hopefully he'll be claimed by another team, allowing him to wrap up his NHL career on a high note, perhaps reaching 1,000 games or 500 goals -- both impressive milestones well within reach during this season. In the meantime, my somewhat authentic Russian army #89 and #23 jerseys, and my "Blue Streak" poster from his Maple Leafs days will sit quietly, awaiting a distinguished finish to a distinguished player's career.

You know it's a good day when your favorite hockey play has his mug on the nhl.com splash page. Patrik's back &em Elias returned to the ice last night at the Meadowlands, reunited with Gomez and Gionta on the EGG line. For all of the excitement in our house, it could have easily been a reunion of the band whose bass man first brought us Back to the EGG.

Patrik looked good, using his body as well as his stick, and he was smiling - one of the things we love best about Elias. It is supposed to be fun, right?

A big night all around - Jamie Lagenbrunner notched his first goal since Thanksgiving. Marty Brodeur got his first shutout since Easter - of 2004. Scott Gomez assisted on the first two goals, giving him a streak of registering 8 points on consecutive scoring plays, a new team record. Paul Martin, who has struggled as a sophomore, looked sharp and picked up an assist as well.

Unfortunately, the good hockey vibes didn't carry up the Turnpike to the Ice House, where the NJ Ice Dragons ended our winning streak at one game, dropping an ugly one 5-3 and putting us at 3-6 just before the midpoint of the season. When I asked "What happened to the easy teams in this division," one of my teammates responded "Hey, we are the easy team now." Ouch. But it's still fun, which is what I keep telling myself as I hobble through mid town on a chilly matinee day.

Nothing a like week without email, cell phone, or CNBC to make you catch up on the recreational reading:

The Big Bang, Simon Singh. Another outstanding book from Singh, with the best one-paragraph explanation of Einstein's general theory of relativity as you'll find anywhere.

Rocketman, Nancy Conrad. The biography of Pete Conrad. I'll admit to a soft spot for most things written by or about fellow Tigers. Conrad gets extra points for taking a Princeton flag to the moon on Apollo 12. It is uproariously funny in parts.

Shaking Her Assets, Robin Epstein and Renee Kaplan. I vaguely remember buying this on the basis of an amazon.com recommendation, and it was a bad one. It was sufficient distraction for the flight to Jamaica, but that was about it.

Spin State, Chris Moriarty. Another amazon.com recommendation based on previous gobbling up of everything written by Orson Scott Card and Charles Stross. Quite simply, an outstanding new science fiction writer. Her physics are solid (how many SciFi books come with a bibliography, excepting the made-up tomes of Frank Herbert's works?). Reading this immediately after Singh's book was coincidence, but it did help to have quantum mechanics on the brain.

The Pact, Jodi Picoult. I read Picoult's Mercy years ago, when I saw it strategically positioned near the entrance of the local bookstore and recognized the name as one within my Princeton undergraduate orange light cone. I've since read everything she's written, and each time I finish a book I think "Wow, how'd she ever research that?" You can call her writing style "moral fiction" if you wish; she develops her characters forwards and backwards in time so that you don't form opinions of them as much as you feel for them.

My cast of alter egos grew by one over the holiday break. That's me, in a Santa suit, accompanied by my "elves" as we prepared to make landfall on the beach in front of the Hotel Riu Ocho Rios.

Backstory: On Christmas morning, the head of the entertainment crew at the hotel asked if I'd step in as Santa Claus. There were a few small facts omitted, but I considered this fair payback for my near-continuous musical mauling of Babylon By Bus by the pool.

The Prep: I was literally stuffed into a Santa suit, equipped with workman's boots and handed a Hefty bag of trash to lug around, turning me from one resident of the North Pole (Frosty) into another (Santa) in about 40 minutes. I got a nice tour of the backstage area at the hotel, and got to see first-hand what it's like to be in the entertainment division of a major resort. What we see is people having fun, teaching aerobics on the beach and making up silly games by the pool. What we don't see are the 12 hour days, six days a week, including cleaning up the backstage, front stage, tables, and bar areas after every show.

The Approach: If the Jamaican Bobsled Team has to go to Wyoming to train, how do you find enough cold stuff to land Santa for gift dispensing? You use a fishing boat and drive it up on the beach. True to form, I slammed my red velour covered shin into the gunwale of the boat. I'll swear I was Santa but won't swear as Santa.

The Kids: About 100 kids followed me through the property, through the main lobby, and back to the show stage, where I sat and posed for pictures while handing out gifts. I only lost my beard twice, both times when I grabbed white nylon and a kid at the same time and snapped the elastic on the back of my head.

Major props to Bill Rosenblatt, good friend and former roommate, without whom I never would have discovered Rastafarianism, the Lion of Judah, Positive Vibrations, or how much fun it is to bring a bit of the snow and cold to part of the world that's always warm. Irie, mon.

I accidentally started a tradition last year by making a list so I'm compelled to do one this year as well.

Best Parenting Moment. Watching my daughter read from the Torah outside of Robinson's Arch at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and my son blow the shofar in the same spot where it's been used to signal the Jewish people for more than 3,000 years. No better way to learn tradition than to be part of one.

Best Sports Moment. Bronze Medal game, Can/Am hockey tournament, Lake Placid New York. A year after losing in double overtime, our youth team came up big with a 4-1 win over a cross-county rival to bring home the bronze medal. Every player took the ice in the game, every player contributed, and everyone celebrated. Sometimes miracles happen through hard work and good coaching.

Best Work Moment. CEC05, our Customer Engineering Conference, in which we brought together about 1/3 of the customer-facing sales and services engineers in the company for training, sharing, executive pitches and some fun. Sun's success is tied to our ability to amplify and apply our messages, and the attendees at CEC05 demonstrated a tremendous ability to do both, all the more impressive after an amped up AC/D She show at the final party.

Best E-Mail. After starting my own baseball blog this year, borrowing the number of my all-time favorite Buc Willie Stargell, I got an email from Stargell's niece thanking me for the tribute to her late uncle.

Best New Toy. Linksys Wireless Range Expander. Plugged it into the wall 2 floors above my main wireless access point, hit "autoconfigure" and fifteen seconds later the bedroom area of our new house had a 5-bar signal. No wires, no conduits, no punchdowns, no electricians.

Best Reading Accomplishment. Finished the trilogy of Simon Singh's books: Fermat's Enigma, Code and The Big Bang. Singh is a gifted writer who makes math and science entertaining. Tim O'Reilly told me that the way to make technology books interesting is to write as if you're teaching someone a game by having them watch you play. Singh captures that same feeling as he peels back modular forms, crypto systems, Copernican astronomy and quantum gravity for the untrained reader.

Best Shopping Experience.I remember the months before my daughter was born, back in 1991, having no clue how to shop for my own children. I was definitely worried about buying appropriately interesting toys, and not just things I remembered wanting as a kid. During our move, we managed to lose one knight from a hand-carved stone chess set of my son's; we bought it in Mexico a few years ago and there was no way to replace the missing piece. After a few days of poking around on eBay, Google, and some online game stores, I found a King Arthur-themed resin set that matched the stone board we have set up in the family room. It was greeted with "King Arthur and chess! Two of my favorite things!" There is no better feeling in gift giving than finding a gift that synthesizes (current) interests.

Best Poker Hand. Hit a straight flush playing video poker in Atlantic City, and three hands later my friend Joel (sitting next to me) hit his first ever royal flush. A chorus of shouts and high-fives rose over the ringing of the jackpot buzzer, and the buzzer beat us as it rang up 8,000 credits. Even at nickel stakes, it was a nice win.

To all Sun employees, customers, friends, family, readers, browsers, Googlers, and occasional passer-by: Happy New Year.