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

If you've spent any time with Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, you know that he's very, very high bandwidth. Once he gets going, he's a stream of pure information. This makes conversational style content pretty difficult, because you don't want to slow him down and lose bits. So I opened up our Innovating@Sun podcast with Andy by comparing him to Madonna and Ichiro -- two players who don't need surnames to move mass markets.

In this case, the market being reshaped is that of "commodity computing." This isn't anything new to Andy, since the very first Stanford University Network workstation was a composition of a Motorola processor, a commodity Ethernet chip (at the time) and the commodity operating system for the then-popular DEC VAX systems, BSD Unix. The emphasis isn't on the commodity components; they are defined by intersecting supply, cost and demand curves. It is, as it has been, about building a computing environment that scales in terms of power, space, cooling, reliability and sustainability. Andy goes through everything from common chassis and physical design to the convergence of servers and storage controller architectures to why it's good to have developers for your routers. He speaks from authority, having done just about everything in the list personally, at, by and for high bandwidth.