Jonathan Schwartz's Blog
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 01:36:31 -0800
Nov 13, 2008 12:19AM
The Inside Story (Java, Microsoft and MySQL)
As consumer spending slows across the world, a variety of "brick and mortar" retailers are clearly feeling the impact. Foot traffic is slowing, and it's getting harder to balance debt laden real estate portfolios and fickle consumer trends.
For consumer product manufacturers, retail distribution is key - it's how you get in front of a customer. It's why the big PC manufacturers are all working hard to score deals with big retailers (or build their own retail outlets) around the world.
But making money on PC's is tough - for most PC makers, you're remarketing someone else's operating system and someone else's microprocessor - it's not for the faint of heart (or faint of balance sheet). For Sun, our retail distribution concerns don't surround consumer hardware (we don't make PC's) as much as consumer software - the popularity of which defines our market opportunity. Said simply, if you're running Java or another open source platform, Sun can build differentiated datacenters in the clouds behind those devices. If not, it's a lot tougher (not impossible, just a lot tougher).
Consumer software, though, is defined by a virtuous cycle. Developers target popular software (like Firefox, Flash or Java). In so doing, they create applications and content that consumers use. What consumers use, they tend to use in volume (the internet's a very big place, after all). Developers notice those volumes, and target the platforms that reach the most consumers. And that defines Sun's market opportunity (someone smart once jumped up and down on stage yelling "Developers! Developers! Developers!" Amen.)
The Java runtime remains one of the world's most popular platforms used by developers - and thus, one of the world's most popular consumer software products. 
For the cynics about to chime in with "but I don't use it," the odds are good you do - it's become an invisible, but critical part of an enormous breadth of consumer and business services (from video uploaders on social networks, to stock market analytical tools). And as that content becomes more popular, so does the Java platform - expanding Sun's market opportunity in the corresponding datacenters. That's why we see it as a virtuous cycle.
That cycle also provides Sun with some exceptional foot traffic - just last month, we distributed more than 60,000,000 Java runtimes, to users all across the planet. The number is growing, as more content is built for Java 6 and the upcoming JavaFX, as more PC's join the network, and as more workers join the workforce (and are assigned Java-enabled laptops). At this point, I'd bet there are about 1,000,000,000 (that's a billion) Java runtimes installed on PC's around the world. With more by the day - each generating revenue for Sun.
As with most of our software products, we don't distribute products without intent - like Google, our products are both a means of acquiring customers, and generating revenue. Freely distributed software establishes a relationship with an end user - just like free search, free news or free shopping. About two years ago, we reached an agreement with Google in which they recognized the value of our relationships with Java consumers. Just as the PC makers want distribution via retail outlets, Google wanted distribution of their search technologies - via our Java update mechanism. When we present an update to a user, we may offer other sponsored software (a Google search toolbar, eg).
After a careful negotiation, we agreed, and crafted a wonderful relationship that served consumers, Google, and Sun. Last year, we renewed the agreement, and recognized even more value for all involved. This year, we decided to run an open auction, and received bids from a number of companies. It was a tough process, but given the growing volume and momentum around Java, we clearly represented just about the most popular distribution vehicle on the internet today - and Microsoft worked hard to represent the most attractive total offer.
The decision to go with Microsoft was based on overall value - it was also predicated upon their endorsement of and agreement to help promote MySQL. Stay tuned for more details on what we'll be doing together.
What's the deal worth to Sun? This deal will be one of the most valuable distribution deals ever struck in the industry - and it likely makes Microsoft one of Sun's largest customers. It'll also set the stage for an even more interesting auction next year, as more and more folks realize the value of retail distribution. Thus far, our deal with Microsoft is US only - and new auctions are in flight for international rights (alongside other non-toolbar products for the US, perhaps a browser...).
As for other high value distribution assets at Sun? I just read one analyst report questioning whether anyone actually used OpenOffice. We happen to run Sun Microsystems on OpenOffice - more importantly, it's used across the world, and we're now commercially licensing it to brand name companies wanting to save big dollars on office productivity.
To put some data around its popularity, last week, we distributed more than 3,000,000 copies of OpenOffice 3. Downloads are accelerating, giving us a reachable user base we estimate to be between 150,000,000 and 200,000,000 users - a global recession will amplify OpenOffice adoption. And 100's of millions of users drive a lot of foot traffic. An auction's afoot (no pun intended) to see who we'll be partnering with us to integrate their businesses and brands into our binary product distribution - the possibilities are limitless: people tend to print those documents, fax them, copy them, project them (and I know this annoys my friends in the free software community, but branding allows us to invest more in OO.o community and features, from which everyone benefits).
With Verizon running a similar auction to integrate a search vendor into their wireless devices, they (and their industry across the world) are seeing the same opportunity. Just because a few retailers are having trouble doesn't mean the value of reaching customers has gone away. Foot traffic still counts, but in today's economy, software distribution's a lot easier to manage and monetize than a real estate portfolio.
After all, who wouldn't want to meet a few hundred million new customers?
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Update: I should've clarified, above: users without any interest in toolbars can simply decline the offer during install - and receive their Java update without any sponsored software.
Nov 10, 2008 09:40AM
You Have to Stop to Change Direction
The bursting of the internet bubble was good for the computer industry.
Many of us didn't like the medicine, but I can't remember a single customer upset at the idea of paying $20,000 for computing infrastructure that used to cost them $100,000. 
The price compression came from open source software, and a move toward general purpose servers, and resulted in companies formerly making 65% gross profit on products (Sun among them) facing a new reality.
But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Since then, Sun's built the biggest open source software business around (see this report for details), from platform software to application infrastructure (even a consumer product or two). Like Google and Microsoft, our products are both our ads and our revenue streams - our brands, and products, are recognized globally.
And that brings me to today. I was on a call last week with the Global CIO for one of our largest customers - one who was dramatically affected by the credit crisis. I was outlining where we were headed in open storage (a business that grew more than 150% for Sun last quarter), and he said, "One of your peers just told me flash was overhyped." I asked him if the peer happened to work for a proprietary storage company. He protected his source, but I knew the answer (I probably knew the CEO, too).
The storage industry bears a remarkable resemblance to the proprietary server industry at the bursting of the
internet bubble - closed, highly profitable, frustrating customers with exorbitant charges. Plump, and ripe for change. Like a plum. Flash memory and open source file systems are about to change the landscape, and upend the industry - you read it here, first.
A notable philosopher once said, "You have to stop to change direction" - and for better or worse, I know a lot of customers stopping right now. They're rethinking their future, and it's into that thought process we're introducing our newest open storage platforms, engineered with flash memory and open software to radically scale back what customers have to spend - while radically increasing performance, capability and ease of use.
Amplifying our Thumper product line, what started as the FISHWorks Project (Fully Integrated Software and Hardware) in Sun's Labs, is now being unveiled - in the Sun Storage 7000 line of unified storage products.
Now, storing data on a disk is fairly straightforward. But administering large pools of fully replicated data, diagnosing problems on production systems, seamlessly dealing with capacity planning and disk failures, spanning every protocol known to man - all without draining your budget with antediluvian license keys and proprietary hardware - those are very high value problems to solve.
And those are exactly the problems we've solved.
The 7000 class systems take about five minutes to set up and provision (yes, five), and we've eliminated almost all the complexity around volume administration and drive failure (remember, ZFS technology is at the core). The 7000 systems are driven by the most scalable, powerful, open storage microcode in the industry: the OpenSolaris kernel. DTrace analytics provide a real-time lens into production systems - to understand performance, workloads, and help make live capacity-planning decisions (click picture at left for a sample control panel). The systems come bundled with a full suite of protocol, data management and availability features - built into the system without incremental fees or license keys.
Storage customers and administrators are about to experience a radical improvement to their quality of life - all without pharmaceutical intervention. And as the price of flash memory continues to plummet, it's only going to get better.
But you have to stop to change direction.
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Try out a 7000 free of charge - just go to our Try and Buy page, select a configuration, and give one a whirl.
And as we did to kick start awareness of our Niagara systems, for those capable or interested, write a blog or publish a review (use the tag "fishworks") - we'll select (at our sole discretion) from those we see, and give a few 7000's away to those with the most valuable/constructive comments. All reviews are eligible (good and bad).
A little bit of history here, too.
Nov 05, 2008 12:00AM
On behalf of Sun Microsystems, I would like to offer my sincerest congratulations to President elect Barack Obama. What an extraordinary accomplishment.
I would also like to extend my congratulations to his web team for having chosen MySQL as the platform behind their election web site, BarackObama.com.
Lest many of you get your hopes up, we cannot guarantee the White House to all MySQL users.
Oct 30, 2008 02:00PM
Understanding Sun's Business - Q1 Results
We announced our earnings today, and put specifics around our preannouncement from a week ago.
We also greatly increased the transparency of Sun's business by providing line item detail surrounding our most important product categories (and we broke out core elements of our Software business for the first time). If you'd like to listen to our earnings call, just click here - in addition, here's a quick synopsis of the quarter and our business overall.
At a corporate level in Q1, Sun's revenue was down 7% year over year. Growth in our emerging products was more than offset by declines in our traditional, high end products. We were surprised by the magnitude of the decline, which reflected a dramatic slowing in the US and Europe, and the effects the credit crisis is having on our customers - across nearly all geographies and industries, but clearly concentrated among financial services companies.
Unlike our peers, Sun is more exposed to high end systems - so declines in this business have an immediate impact, even if our newer, emerging businesses demonstrate fantastic growth (which many did). For example, the Tape market won't sustain 30% year over year growth for any participant - but our ZFS based OpenStorage products are growing at more than 100%. The latter are smaller, emerging businesses, driven by open source and new innovations - and will take time to eclipse more traditional businesses in our P&L.
To drive an even greater level of transparency for investors and analysts, we've added a new management report to our quarterly updates - for the first time, this will give line item detail of our performance, and a sense for how we're making some of the most important decisions at the core of our long term strategy. You can find that break out, here.
Here are a few of the major questions I'm receiving:
What went well within the quarter?
The biggest highlights were the performance of our Solaris based, chip multi-threading (CMT) systems, which again grew a whopping 80%, year over year. These systems leverage awareness of Solaris/Opensolaris and our outstanding ISV portfolio, and are driven by extreme energy efficiency and virtualization - attributes we just multiplied with the launch of our newest CMT system: the T5440.
Simultaneously, our Open Storage systems also delivered a great quarter, up 150+% year over year. These systems, known by many as Thumpers, are amplified by the awareness of our open source ZFS file system, a technology at the heart of Sun's storage business. You'll be hearing more about Open Storage at a launch event we're holding on November 10th. If you're technical, and you want some hints about what we're about to unveil, click here.
And finally, most of our software business grew - including MySQL, Java, alongside Solaris, management and our virtualization products. As we've been saying, open source is a great distribution model - and it feeds a great revenue model.
What about lowlights?
Clearly the traditional businesses slowed significantly - with enterprise systems (our largest, mainframe class systems) declining year over year. This time last year, those same systems grew nearly 20% - so the downturn is having an impact. It's crucial to understand these systems are far less sensitive to open source innovations or Solaris adoption - they're sold to customers who are scaling up existing Solaris applications, who rely on quality, fault tolerance and our capacity to deliver mainframe scale. We and Fujitsu just expanded this product line - and no matter the downturn, we remain exceptionally focused and committed to traditional enterprise computing. The expansion of scale out computing doesn't negate scale up computing - if anything, it leads to even greater demand, over time. IBM was right, mainframes will always be sexy (especially when they run Solaris :).
On the storage front, tape declined slightly, although our high end storage systems grew, yielding growth overall in storage - growth we're driving to accelerate with the introduction of our upcoming Open Storage innovations.
Why were gross margins lower this quarter?
A few reasons that Mike Lehman, our CFO, elaborated on during the call - the lull in very high end systems, along with discounting and component pricing depressed gross margins. In addition, we went through a series of product transition related expenses this quarter we do not expect to recur, that depressed margins by around 2 percentage points.
Now, how is Software growing if you give everything away?
We make our software freely available to enable its distribution to the farthest reaches of the market - which we then monetize with commercial subscriptions and services, alongside optimized hardware systems (like Open Storage, above). We continue to reach customers that have already settled on our software - the process of selling to them is simplified by the fact they're already using our core products. And unlike most university students (who typically have more time than money), our paying customers view downtime or administrative complexity as more expensive than a software subscription (that is, they have more money than time).
Thus, customers will pay, and continue to pay for access to enterprise grade features, along with mission critical support and maintenance - the Software business is both a license, subscription and services business.
To understand the total size and value of Software at Sun, you need to look at billings alongside our multi billion dollar support streams - remembering that a lot of our software is sold as a subscription service (remember, it's open source). In addition, you have to recognize that how much a "Systems Service" support contract is attributable to software is entirely subjective (we don't price them separately to customers). It's like asking how much revenue a mobile phone manufacturer should attribute to their operating system - you're not charged separately at the point of sale.
Wait, you make money off Java?
Yes, it's among the most profitable technology products at Sun - and improving. Java's one of the most popularly distributed pieces of Software on the internet, we distribute over a million Java runtimes a day to users across every OS and geography on PC's. That helps us reach a very broad community of users and, more importantly, developers. We have some exciting news coming up around these distribution volumes - and their value to us, and others.
What is Sun focusing on?
Strategically, we continue to focus on two core areas - creating the world's largest, and fastest growing developer communities - for whom we build the products, services and technologies on which they'll build their products and services. With brands like MySQL, Java and OpenSolaris - we measure and drive their adoption very aggressively.
And secondly, we deliver compelling commercial offers to those deploying applications - across a diversity of industries - through commercial subscription, services and optimized system products. That is, we sell datacenter systems, software and services.
We're focused on today's customers with our current products and services, and tomorrow's customers with our investments in freely distributed software.
Operationally, we're focused on execution - in the field, in the labs, and on behalf of our shareholders. Innovation loves a crisis, even when the stock markets don't - and Sun's positioned very well to supply the platforms on which the next generation of clouds will be built.
What are you hearing from customers?
It really depends upon industry and geography. From Wall St. I've heard, "I can't take your call until I crawl out from under my desk," (only a slight exaggeration) - at the other extreme, an executive at a professional social networking company said, "we're being crushed with new accounts."
But there are three basic themes I'm hearing.
The first is a profound concern surrounding the global economy. If the headlines are bad, you hold off consumer spending - if you hold off on consumer spending, the headlines are likely to worsen. It's tough to break that cycle.
The second is a reaffirmation of the importance of technology - for discovering drugs, running businesses, modeling supply chains and automating business processes, technology's not getting less important, it's getting more important. Even if budgets are tight in the near term.
The third is the need for change - one executive to whom I spoke recently said her entire discretionary budget was consumed by one proprietary vendor's price increase. So she's out looking for an alternative, and MySQL fits the bill. Which is to say, necessity's the mother of invention - and there's a lot of necessity going around right now.
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All in all, it was a tough quarter for Sun and our customers - but we're emboldened by the progress we made in our emerging markets and technology areas, investments we plan on amplifying and accelerating. Investments whose adoption will be hastened by customers facing new choices.
Stay tuned for our newest storage announcements on November 10th... just as the popping of the internet bubble let loose a flood of innovation for the server world, the global credit crisis is about to shake up the storage industry, too.
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Safe Harbor Statement
Jonathan's blog contains forward-looking statements regarding the future results and performance of Sun including statements with respect to our commitment to enterprise computing, the demand for scale up computing, the continued business of our paying customers, upcoming news regarding Java distribution volumes and value, expectations for the OpenOffice community, our strategy and related progress, our positioning with respect to the next generation of clouds and our expectations with respect to investments in emerging markets and technology areas. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and actual results could differ materially from those predicted in any such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in such forward-looking statements include: competition; pricing pressures; the complexity of Sun's products and the importance of rapidly and successfully developing and introducing new products; Sun's dependence on significant customers, specific industries and geographies; delays in product development or customer acceptance and implementation of new products and technologies; Sun's ability to implement a new enterprise resource planning system; a material acquisition, restructuring or other event that results in significant charges; failure to successfully integrate acquired companies; reliance on single-source suppliers; risks associated with Sun's ability to purchase a sufficient amount of components to meet demand; inventory risks; risks associated with the quality of Sun's products; risks associated with international customers and operations; Sun's dependence on channel partners; failure to retain key employees; and risks associated with Sun's ability to achieve expected cost reductions within expected time frames. Please also refer to Sun's periodic reports that are filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2008. Sun assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update these forward-looking statements.
Oct 02, 2008 03:42PM
I thought I'd share a note I sent earlier in the week to Sun's leaders - about the turmoil we're seeing in the markets, and how I want our team focusing their efforts.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Begin forwarded message:
From: Jonathan Schwartz
Date: September 30, 2008 12:02:29 AM PDT
To: All Sun
Subject: Headlines, Financial Crisis, etc.
You can't have missed today's headlines - the American Congress failed to pass a critical bill authorizing the Treasury to put a floor under the US banking sector. The market swooned, and politicians in the US, and across the world, are bickering over the right long term answer - jump in and take action to save the troubled institutions, or step aside and let the market sort it out. Several more banks/insurers were shuttered or bailed out today - I'm confident we haven't seen the last of these collapses and rescues.
And I know there are questions about "how does this affect Sun?" Well, I believe almost all our core customers will be affected - not just the banks, but the telcos, hospitals, media companies, construction firms, airlines, governments, startups, you name it. Every customer that depends upon credit as a means of financing their business - whether it's a university or a Fortune 100 transportation company - is going to be under severe stress.
It's also going to create a huge opportunity - if we're on offense. Not on defense, not worried about the impact on Sun, but driving the outcomes for Sun's customers and shareholders.
And here are a few important things to remember.
1. Our customers look to technology as a means of driving value and productivity.
You're not going to hear from any of our customers, "let's stop buying technology and hire more people to do the work." They're going to default to the opposite - automating work, and finding answers and opportunities with technology, not headcount. And in that process lies an opportunity for Sun - to engage with customers in driving down cost, driving up utilization, and driving the changes that yield immediate and long term benefit. The right question for every customer you meet is - "how can I help?" I assure you, they'll have ideas for us. And we have no shortage of ideas for them. Personally, I'm reaching out to customers and partners just to check in and offer help - I'd recommend you do the same.
2. That said, we are aggressively expanding our customer base.
Our concentration in financial services and telecommunications is exactly why we're working so hard to expand our customer base. We're dramatically underpenetrated in the global market - and that represents a great opportunity. I need every executive to think seriously, esp. in the market-facing portions of the organization, about growing our current relationships and growing new customers. The 'and' is important - growth matters in both contexts.
And why do I think we have permission to grow new customers?
3. Because innovation loves a crisis.
Remember the bursting of the internet bubble? The initial wave of open source adoption followed that collapse some six or seven years ago. That same zeal for breakthrough, game changing economics is back with a vengeance - and this time, Sun's positioned as the single biggest potential beneficiary. Want proof? As companies move to lower the cost of proprietary database vendors, their number one choice is: MySQL. The number one choice to lower spending on proprietary storage: ZFS with OpenStorage. How will the proprietary alternatives fare against xVM? Glassfish? Lustre? OpenSolaris? Same, from where I sit. There's opportunity everywhere I look.
We can, and should, be on offense across the board. From our newest Batoka and M-Series SPARC systems, to our newest Constellation Intel and AMD blades, from our network identity offerings (talk about automating labor-intensive processes!) to leveraging our amazing SunRay thin clients, or our PS and Support Services capabilities - we have the most powerful offers we've had in years. Imagine if our portfolio had been this strong when the dot com bubble burst - we'd have swept the floor, and been in a dramatically different spot.
Which is all to say, there will be no end of opinions surrounding what the US, or the EU, or the Asian governments should be doing to bolster economic performance. I'm not that interested in the public debate - I am infinitely more interested in the private debate - going on inside every one of our customers surrounding "which OS will we pick?" "What's my open source strategy?" "How can I radically reduce spending on proprietary storage?" "How can I save on power and space?" Which vendor understands my problems?" "Which vendors are asking if they can help - which are truly my partners?"
In times of crisis, we have a big opportunity to stand apart from our peers, to be better connected to the market, even if it's in turmoil. Yes, our customers are going to be under stress, but that's simply another way of saying "open to change." And I want Sun to be the company engaging them in the transition - with our ideas and our roadmaps. The door is open.
And yes, we will see some customers disappear - we will also see many emerge even stronger. And the market, as it's done for the past 30 years, will return to growth - led by the companies that took advantage of the downturn to become even more valuable, to grow even faster.
So I want to assure you, we are watching the market very carefully, to understand the impact on Sun, and the challenges in front of us - on a macro and micro level. But I and my leadership team know the drill, we've seen this before when the last bubble burst - *now is the time* to get in front of the opportunity, and firmly establish new ground. Now's the time our customers will be most open to change.
Let's be sure we're there to help - and to take advantage of the opportunity.
Jonathan
Copyright 2008
Greg Matter
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 01:35:31 -0800
Jan 16, 2008 09:46PM
The Three Most Important Applications
Around 1995, I gave a series of academic talks that tried to capture what I had learned at Sun during my first couple of years away from teaching at M.I.T. My biggest lesson was that, in the world of enterprise computing, there were three applications that really mattered: Databases, Big Databases, and Really Big Databases. I actually went way out on a limb predicting that, by 2000, we'd likely see terabyte-sized production databases (imagine that!).
The punch line being how databases were shaping key aspects of server and storage systems design at Sun: large memory, lots of I/O and memory bandwidth, RAS, symmetric multiprocessing and, of course, an operating system (Solaris) that could grok it all. We ended up creating systems that were naturally very well-suited for running, well, really big databases from the likes of DB2, Informix, Oracle, Sybase. We also worked very closely with all of these folks to continually tune performance and bolster availability.
Good for us at the time, a bunch of people found many of these system design values --- especially around memory bandwidth and I/O --- made great Web 1.0 machines, too.
A decade later, databases matter even more. They are to storage what application containers are to computing. That isn't to minimize the importance of file systems --- those are the foundational storage abstractions, just as threads and processes are to application containers like Apache and Glassfish. Databases have continued a primary influence over big swaths of our systems design (and so has high performance computing). The overall system center now being scaled-out network assemblies of web/application and database tiers.
In the contemporary web era, not only have the enterprise databases grown in force (I'd rightfully add SQL Server to the list today) but open source databases (OSDBs) have come into their own: MySQL, PostgreSQL and Derby (to name but a few). These have wonderful affinity with the modern application containers, especially PHP and Java. And, indeed, MySQL has become foundational to the web, the M in LAMP.
And guess what? We've been targeting big swaths of our $2B R&D budget to engineer systems that run these workloads really well, too. The exciting part for thousands of engineers at Sun is that now we get to rub shoulders with the great engineers at MySQL. We are champing at the bit to optimize and scale systems in a myriad of ways: from microelectronics to memory systems to storage to kernel engineering. In the magic transparency of open source, these optimizations will lift all boats.
And that is the truly exciting part. We now get to openly develop a new wave of very deep innovation in hardware and software systems. Ones that will continue the movement of customer's capital to be invested in those who sustain in truly adding value, rather than adding to switching costs.
A big open embrace to everyone at MySQL and welcome to the Sun family. This is going to be fun!
Sep 13, 2007 09:48PM
You might imagine that being the technical executive sponsor for Microsoft at Sun would be one of those "challenging" roles, but it also has been a rewarding one (especially working with the likes of Bill Gates and Craig Mundie). The biggest challenges have been in the areas of bridging cultures and business models and, of course, in building trust between two companies that have been and continue to be (at times, aggressively) competitive.
But at the core, we are both engineering-centric, products-offered companies where everything flows from a long-term, management-dedicated investment in R&D. Tens of thousands of really good engineers, most working on multi-year event horizons.
Microsoft matters because R&D matters.
And from my vantage point, it's been good to see the return in perception of the importance of R&D and resulting innovation in the marketplace. Just look at the rise of Apple, VMware and Google: at the core of all three are great engineers and designers building market-differentiated products. It's also good to see an ebb in the post-bubble conventional wisdom that the only thing that matters is driving cost into the dirt. As if all of of the problems in computing have been solved, and it's all about cost of production --- be it hardware or software. As if...
And that brings me back to our relationship with Microsoft. Our mantra has been "product interop", because at the end of the day, that's what our mutual customers care about. Pragmatically, we will both continue to innovate in our own ways, and continue to strive for differentiated products in the marketplace. And those products, pretty much up and down the stack, are and will be different.
Those differences are precisely the points of value and frustration for our customers. Value from choice, focus and the always heightened pace of innovation that comes from competition. Frustration from what I call "gratuitous incompatibilities": those places where our product stacks touch one another, but don't work well together. Places where we have left problems to be solved as an Exercise for the End-User.
These touch-points have been things such as identity, web services protocols, storage, and systems
management. Adding to this list are touch points around the hardware platform itself, especially virtualization.
We've been making a lot of progress on these, and if both Microsoft and Sun matter to you, I'd encourage you to check out our resources and capabilities.
Sep 09, 2007 01:44PM
I've received a very interesting array of comments from the Information Week redshift story but nothing quite rivals a slashdot spanking. I keep seeing a set of misconceptions --- which I'll take as a failure to communicate :) --- so let me take a shot re-summarizing the basic points.
Redshift is an observation about the growth of computing demand of applications. If your application's computing needs are growing faster than Moore's Law, then color it red. If they are growing slower, or about the same, color it blue.
Redshift applications are under-served by Moore's Law. The simple and obvious consequence is that the infrastructure required to support redshift apps needs to scale up. That is, the absolute number of processors, storage and networking units will grow over time. Conversely, infrastructure required by blue-shift apps will shrink as you get to consolidate them onto fewer and fewer systems.
Refining just a little, redshift apps appear to fall into three basic categories:
Sum-of-BW. Basically, these are all of the consumer-facing apps (think YouTube, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter) that are serving the bits behind an Internet whose aggregate BW is growing faster than Moore's Law.
*-Prise. These are software-as-a-service style consolidation of apps that, at most enterprises, are blue. But
there is a huge market over which to consolidate, so growth rates can become quite large (think eBay, SuccessFactors, Salesforce.com)HPC. Technical high performance computing was the pioneer of horizontal scale. For a good reason: halve the price of a unit of computing or storage, and most HPC users will buy twice as much. These apps are expanding gasses in the Nathan Myhrvold sense (think financial risk simulation, weather simulation, reservoir management, drug design).
Why it's a big deal now is my assertion (okay, SWAG) that we are nearing an inflection point where the majority, volume-wise, of computing infrastructure is in support of redshift applications. One the other side of this point is a kind of phase change where the great mass of computing is delivered through redshift-purposed infrastructure.
And if you believe this and you are in the business of building computing infrastructure, then you might want to think really hard about what all this means in terms of what is import and and where you invest your R&D dollars. Read: it's much more about how hardware and software conspire to become scalable systems, than it is about individual boxes.
Oh, and I guess I have to explain my abuse of a very well-understood physical phenomenon. The spectrum emitted from an object moving away from you looks like it has shifted in its entirety to a lower frequency (and thus "towards red" for the visible spectrum). When measuring the spectra of many galaxies, Hubble observed a correlation between the distance and spectrum: the further away a galaxy is from us, the greater the average redshift. A reasonable explanation for this is that space itself is expanding.
And thus (blame me, my lame marketing), the demand for scalable infrastructure is an expanding opportunity. Fact was, I didn't want to change my slides. Apologies to cosmologists everywhere.
May 14, 2007 09:29AM
It is certainly encouraging to see reform of the U.S. patent system gain the attention of Congress (thanks, Rep. Lamar Smith!). Both the normalization with respect to international practices as well as starting to move damages more in line with actual harm. Clearly, the reform is trying to strike a compromise even among R&D-based companies: biotech and software being the poles. The debate for IT companies should be more fundamental: are software patents useful?
We should be judging "utility" objectively.
Patents are neither evil manifestations of corporate interests, nor an inalienable right of the subsisting lone inventor. They are contracts among us with the mutual self-interest of accelerating and sustaining innovation. Abstractly there could be lots of optimal points here, so we'll overlay a bias towards protecting individuals and especially individual freedom. In this sense, I'm not only highly aligned with Stallman, but have been heavily influenced by his thinking.
So, back to the basic question: are software patents useful, viz do they maximize innovation and the freedom to innovate?
My answer is "(mostly) No". And certainly not under our current view of how and for what they are awarded. And just to be clear, don't construe this as even a hint of criticism of patent offices around the world. These hugely overworked folks are doing what we collectively are asking them to do. It's an extraordinarily demanding job.
I say (mostly) no, because copyright appears to be (mostly) better for maximizing innovation while giving individual copyright holders the ability to modulate compensation and derived works. Larry Lessig (another primary influence in my thinking) and the folks at the Creative Commons have done a spectacular job of creating rather precise set points along this continuum.
What does copyright have to do with patents? With a mild fear of being pedantic, we have five basic tools at our disposal for controlling the distribution of our ideas and their expressions:
1. Public Domain. We can publish our ideas, and expressions of our ideas without restriction. A principal power here is that such publication can blunt or defeat any other person's attempt to obtain a patent, or to enforce copyright.
2. Patent. We can publish our (new and non-obvious) ideas in exchange for a time-limited exclusive right. That right being to *exclude others* from creating any expression of our idea. This is often misunderstood as a right of the inventor exercise the patent. It's not. It is the right to prevent others from doing so. One catch being that the invention may be dependent upon someone else's patented idea who could transitively exercise their right to exclude. Note that the "new and non-obvious" test is subjective and one that we ask our patent examiners to perform, backed up by (frequently technically lay) judges and juries.
3. Copyright. We can publish an expression of our ideas (code) with a vernier of exclusive rights, ranging from "you can't make any copies whatsoever" to "copy any and all freely, just propagate my copyright". There are two cool parts about copyright notices and source code: (1)they are both textual representations that can coexist in the same file, and (2) the copyright notice is a cudgel for a license agreement that can also go along for the ride: "follow the license terms or you can't make any copies whatsoever".
4. Trademark. We can freely publish our code but create a name and/or logo for the code (or, more typically, the binary build) that is sourced from us. In other words, others can use our code but they can't use our name for the code.
5. Trade Secret. Keep our ideas and our code a secret, and punish those who violate the terms of our secret agreement (e.g., an NDA). Of course, you always run the risk that someone else independently develops the idea and does 1,2,3 and/or 4 with it!
Copyright puts the licensing control clearly and explicitly in the hands of the developer. It can also capture a license for any related patents the developer might have obtained. Some of the most effective of these are "patent peace" grants, such as what we have done with CDDL: you get a grant to our patents as long as you follow the copyright license, including that you won't prosecute for any patents that you might have. If you do prosecute, then our patent grant is revoked.
So, in a way, the utility of a software patent here is that it can put even more teeth into the potential enforcement of a public license. That's fine when used this way. But any developer is always open to attack from a patent holder who has no interest in her code (e.g., a troll) other than to extract rents from having read upon the ideas in the patent.
I'm yet to see the case where these attacks are directly or indirectly useful. It's seldom that the patent holder is himself practicing it, so the patent peace provision is empty. These all seem to be taxes upon our industry. (At least we (Sun) have some resources to combat this. We paid almost $100M to Kodak to immunize the entire Java community from infringement claims on mechanisms that Kodak themselves don't use --- they acquired the patents from a third party. This was pure insanity, but we felt like we had to pay this in order to indemnify the whole Java community.)
Patents are a far more blunt instrument than copyright, and tend to teach far less than code. I just don't know of any developer who reads patents to understand some new software pattern or idea. Remember, the limited monopoly we grant a patent holder is in exchange for teaching others how to do it so that when the patent expires everyone is better off (the length of time of the grant is another issue. How long is two decades in software generations?)
Obviously, you make the case that these are the side-effects of an otherwise healthy dynamic balance around innovation. That individuals, start-ups and large companies do indeed need the protection in order to invest in basic software R&D that might yield, say, the reduce the solution to a previously exponential-time problem to a logarithmic one.
Certainly, we (at Sun) feel like we have put some serious coin into developing things like ZFS and dtrace, which we have published under a FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software) license (CDDL for now), and for which we have applied for patents. We will *never* (yes, I said *never*) sue anyone who uses our ZFS codebase and follows the terms of the license: they publish their improvements, propagate the license, and not sue anyone else who uses the ZFS codebase. And look at the innovation not only with ZFS in OpenSolaris, but its adoption by Mac OS X and BSD.
But under what conditions would we enforce our patents? How would we feel if someone did a cleanroom version of ZFS and kept the resulting code proprietary?
We wouldn't feel good, to be sure. But I'd put the burden back on us (certainly as a large company) that if such a thing were to happen it was because we were failing to *continue to* innovate around our original code. Being sanguine about patent protection as an exclusive right would result in less innovation, not more.
Our licensing of our Java implementations under GPLv2 are a case-in-point. The early returns are that we are seeing renewed interest and vitality in the platform and a real acceleration of innovation --- both from us as well as others.
There is a better state for fostering innovation in software. It's one built around the network itself, and one whose principles are grounded in the freedoms entitled by developers in the form of copyright. It's proving to be amazingly stimulating of innovation, and we ought to collectively drive our industry to state of complete FOSS. Either that, or take refuge in trade secrets and trademarks.
In case you haven't noticed, driving to a state of complete FOSS is exactly what we are doing at Sun. With some narrow exceptions, all of our software efforts are or will be under a FOSS license, and we will actively build and participate in communities around these code bases, and work as transparently as we possibly can. Why? Because it maximizes innovation. We have even taken the step of making some of our hardware design free and open. It's still early, but we think this style of open development will also yield a vibrant culture around OpenSparc.
Will we stop pursuing software patents on our software? Can't do that yet. That's simply because our competitors will still go for them, and unless our system changes, we'd have fewer "trading stamps" and end up paying even higher rates to indemnify the users of our software.
Is there anything short of eliminating software patents that could get us off that treadmill and drive us to a maximum innovation state? Well, maybe, given some additional restrictions on their granting. I have a few ideas having to do with teasing apart interfaces from implementations, but that's the subject of a future blog.
Feb 01, 2007 07:00AM
Thanks for the tag, boss. I thought if I simply ignored this, I could avoid answering. But no such luck.
I'm guessing most people don't know that...1. I always wanted to be an oceanographer. I idolized Jacques Cousteau, got my YMCA cert (at 16) in era of horse-collar vests and J-valves, and wanted to design submarines. I started living my dream by working my way through UCSD with a part time job in the Underway Data Processing Group at Scripps. But every time we went out for sea trials, I puked over the fantail. So much for that dream. (Eventually outgrew the sea sickness, fortunately.)
2. My first career was as a controls engineer with HP (in the San Diego division designing servos for plotters) and then Honeywell (doing flight controls). My first job at Honeywell was verifying the stability of re-entry control system on the Shuttle before its first launch. As a junior engineer that was beyond cool.
3. I'm half Greek, half Hungarian. My dad emigrated right after WWII on a post-war reconstruction scholarship meeting my mom at Miami of Ohio. He was Greek Orthodox, she Jewish. Let's just say there was a lot of "energy" in my house growing up.
4. Jonathan pointed out that I love to cook. My latest passion is artisan sour dough bread (thank you Laurie, for still smiling at my bursting mason jars of starter in our new fridge...). It's way low tech (just yeast, flour, water and salt), but deeply rewarding to the psyche.
5. What he didn't point out is that I also survived a train derailment. It was September 13, 2001. I got one of the very last seats out for the California Zephyr out of Chicago on 9/11. In the middle of the night in the Utah desert we hit a coal train. Here's what's left of the engines.
Lemme see,.. Tag you're it DD!
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