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Sun CTO Predicts Internet Consolidation Endgame
Romerican writes "C|Net is running an interview with Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun Microsystems, about the Very Near Future where he essential sees the Internet as no longer competitive. He has blogged his belief that the end game is here and nothing is likely to unseat the new world order." From the C|Net article: "It's called software as a service. It really is the running of what we think of as IT through the network. You don't buy software, you buy the consequence of the software. That starts with the small and medium enterprises. eBay, in my mind, is the leading example of small businesses being absorbed by services. Anybody who clicks their store on eBay is in fact consuming a service. They are contributing to a larger-scale eBay rather than them buying some server and sticking it on their desk."
History shows that the majority of "consolidation" will eventually unwind, fragment, and finally return to something similar to the original way of doing things.
And then it will happen again.
Witness: Mainframe computing to Personal Computing to Thin Client Computing.
unless "services" address this, there will be resistance. maybe not if you're buying used stuff at estate sales and selling it on ebay, but...
free software, open standards, open file formats, no software patents.
someone needs to remind him of the little 'botnet' problem that is currently going around. Sure, pan global networks are a good thing, and will bring us good thing... BUT the only thing they are bringing us right now is SPAM, SPAM, and more SPAM.
Sure, there is Google and eBay et al, but look at the reality of things... all that really needs to happen to stop the world is for 2 of those 5 computers to be infested with spam spewing botnets.
I think that the world is as ready as I am for that to happen... lets just shelve this cute idea before the botnet owners get word of it
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Welcome to the industry, Greg Pramanamana. In the great game of IT sales, the men will tell you that it's always been about pitching benefits (what you call "consequences"). What you actually close with doesn't really matter. Over time the deliverables have almost always been a combination of hardware, software and services; the mix may change over time but the mix will change again when someone's pricing model makes the alternatives look attractive again.
Do you recall that "the network is the computer" idea required ubiquitous broadband?
Only now, and over the next few years, is the idea even practical. So hold your horses, and watch.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
I agree! Ever since I first heard Sun use that slogan, I thought it was dumb. If you ask me, "The Network is FOR the Computer" - and that's all there is to it!
All of these large corporations (IBM, Sun, Microsoft, etc.) envision making a fortune by renting you your software (by serving it to you over the Internet). Like everything else in life though, you've got a LARGE number of folks who'd much rather own than rent. Renting has historically only made sense in the short-term, usually as a "stop gap" measure. You rent a car for a weekend trip, or because the car you own is in the shop for major repairs. You rent an apartment or house because you need someplace to stay, but you aren't in a position, financially, where you can buy a house yet. You likely rent furniture or appliances from a "rent a center" type of establishment because you want to live above your means, and don't have the patience to save up to buy it. So tell me again why I'd want to continuously RENT my applications rather then buy software licenses and install/run the stuff on my OWN equipment?
I was thinking the same thing when I first read this. I want to own and operate my own software. But then I looked at my online usage.
I play WoW. Yeah I bought the software, but the software is worthless with out the online services.
I use Vent. Free software, guild pays for services.
I use hotmail. I don't even have an email client installed at home.
I could go from example to example of how online services have replaced many of my digital and non-digital based activities.
Online services will never be an absolute. For example, online word processors; they will likely do wonderfully in integrated solutions, but I doubt people would start going to www.MSWord.com to write their papers when they can have Word installed locally. To be honest, you'll be hard pressed to move people from desktop Office to just about anything because it is a rock solid application. Heck MS's primary competition for Office 2k7 is still Office 2k! If MS can't get users to upgrade, how is some pay-for-service online tool going to do it?
Anyway, the article might be a bit sensational (surprise!) but it is not with out merritt.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Every software company out there wants "software as a service" to become the New World Order because it represents the Holy Grail: a reliable continuous revenue stream from existing customers.
When you sell software, you get a one-time payment that may or may not ever be repeated. When you sell software as a service, you get continuous revenue. This is what every software company wants. The question is, is this what the client wants.
Enterprise software companies are making a huge push into this space, but I'm still not convinced that the market for it is big enough, at least not yet. For software as a service to work, the client needs to trust its vendor far more than they do now, because not only are they trusting the vendor to provide them a piece of software, they're also trusting the vendor to handle the bulk of their IT functions as well.
This may be desirable for some companies, but I think the vendors are vastly overestimating the market because they want to believe EVERYONE will jump at the chance to hand over control to the vendor.
Obviously, there are some advantages for the client as well, such as being able to do things like true Disaster Recovery, and being able to sit in state of the art data centers and have real backup solutions, things that may cost far more if they wanted to implement them on their own. Even so, I just can't shake the feeling that the size of this market is more fantasy than reality at this point.
From the blog:
Of course there are many, many more service providers but they will almost all go the way of YouTube; they'll get eaten by one of the majors.
The faulty logic here is that it presumes that new independent service providers aren't sprouting up every day. He sees the big trees in the forest, but misses the seeds and sprouts. Maybe that's just because the little guys don't buy pricy Sun hardware, so Sun doesn't see them. But they are there. I have no doubt that for every one web site that gets bought up by the big guys there are many more which don't.
What I see is that the Internet is an exceptionally fertile ground for seeds to sprout in. The existence of large companies such as Yahoo and Google doesn't change that. His comparison to the energy sector is flawed. The ease with which somebody can start up a new web site (sorry, "service provider") is in no way comparable to what it takes to start a new energy provider. Not even close.
It's this kind of nonsense which makes me wonder about the long term viability of Sun. It's no secret that cheap commodity boxes are eating them from the bottom up. So he spins this fairly tale about how all the small web sites (which don't run on Sun hardware) will simply cease to exist leaving only the mega sites (which do buy Sun hardware). Let me know how that works out for you.
Argument about eBay misses a point.
I don't believe anybody that sells on eBay is there because of a few scripts. They are there because of the buyers that search this site. Indeed, it's the unique marketplace, and marketplace was always a service. The fact, that eBay is a virtual one changes nothing.
Software as a service? Yeah... I'm sure we're all going to want to be running Photoshop via the net and trust our precious photos to a third party. I can only agree to a point which is that each family or household should have an expandable central computer that can be scaled to the family. It would provide vital services that each family needs: web server, mail server, VPN server, file server, print server, time server, etc... Families should then be able to interconnect those machines via a LAN-to-LAN VPN system. And of course it should use friendly names that Joe and Jane Average can relate to. Do away with "central server" and call it a "FamilyNet Appliance" or some such claptrap. "Aunt Mary and Uncle John just got a FamilyNet box! Let's link them up the next time they come over. Aunt Mary said that she will bring the Trustcard (a flash device that stores and exchanges encryption keys between trusted machines along with IP info. Static IPs would be required for FamilyNet boxes.) with her so that their system will connect to ours. THAT gives the power to the end-user and not businesses. I don't know about you, but I don't even trust my e-mail to anyone but myself. I run my own mail server. I have ever since an ISP took my account of five years and gave it to someone else when they bought my old ISP and pretty much screwed every high-end customer over.
I think the Sun CTO's predictions also overlook what it is that people actually do with their computers. He's looking at it from completely the wrong angle: business application, specifically e-commerce. The majority of people use their computers for recreational and creative purposes. Sure, you have things like Youtube and MySpace that are all the rage right now, but they are merely distribution points. They aren't actual tools. TO put a video up on Youtube requires that you have a video camera, video capture capabilities on your PC or Mac, and ideally editing software plus all the associated tools to create the content. This is what people WANT. Until we all have 10 gigabit links to the internet and latency is sufficiently low, I don't think that content production tools are suited for network publishing over the internet (aka Software as a Service). This guy's head is up his ass in my opinion.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
(i) costs decline to make it attractive to you (if your $200,000 costs can be cut to $75,000, wouldn't you?
NO. Here's why:
I currently work for a SME of approx. 120 employees, sales in the 75-100 million dollar range.
About 3 years ago I was told that we had 12-15 million dollars of data in our databases. Based on the cost of collecting and maintaing the data (lots of engineering field data). In the past few years we have doubled in size both in employees and in database size, so let's call it 30 million in data in our databases.
This does not include data in documents on the file servers or in emails. SO let's say another 30 million there.
Now, some of our clients compete against each other and we are *very* careful to firewall information so that the data from client A is not seen by client B. Not only could a breach like this resutl in losing client A and/or getting sued by client A, but would ruin our reputation and make it difficult to attract other clients.
The problem is that people take data, good data, far too lightly. Good data is hard to obtain and expensive. Without you are SOL. And so we protect our data and try to insure it is of high quality. We trust no one with the data.
The 'savings' of SaaS are miniscule compared to the risks to the company in this case.
Also data lasts longer than programs or vendors. What happens if the software company goes under or if you need to port it to a new application?
Except for a few cases I think SaaS is very inappropriate and will not be as wide spread as some hope.
You are right though, many companies are already exposing themselves. However, we see it as a false economy. There is no replacement for just doing the work.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
This is a great example of why you're wrong. Or at least, partially wrong.
It's only the US that has so many cars. Everywhere else in the world, people are pretty likely to use public transportation. We have cars in the US because of successful lobbying - public funding for the rail network was cannibalized and applied to the highway system instead. As a result, instead of [comparatively] easily and cheaply maintained railways, we have these insanely expensive to maintain roadways, the environmental cost of having zillions of cars each with their own emissions controls which may be functioning or not, instead of a dramatically smaller number of train engines - the smaller number making emissions controls easier.
As a result of the loss of the rail network, and everyone having cars, residential areas exploded - but rail is still used for some freight, and it's otherwise advantageous to keep businesses close together because they must commonly interface with each other. So we got these intensely packed cities and incredibly spread out rural areas. As a result, most people can no longer afford to live in the cities (due to gentrification) and therefore they need a car because public transportation can not effectively serve the needs of a highly distributed population.
However, in the cities, one typically does not need a car at all. The bulk of your groceries can be ordered, and your perishables can be picked up by hand. Because the population is high there are lots of places to shop, so anywhere you go there is typically someplace to get the goods you want/need. Appliances, likewise, can be delivered. And since the population is packed in, public transportation is an effective means of daily travel. Then, people only rent a car when they need one, such as when they are going on a trip.
Another time people rent cars is when they need a vehicle that has capabilities that the one they currently own lacks. For example, if I need to move a large piece of equipment, but I drive a hatchback, if I'm not just paying someone to ship my equipment, I'm going to need to rent a flatbed truck to get it from point A to point B.
Of course, some people who live in the city have and use a car even though they don't need one - they want the "freedom" of being able to decide where they go (even though everything related to cars is heavily regulated.)
The situation with software is similar. Some people use bought-and-owned (well, the companies will tell you that it's all licensed, but that's another conversation) software because they feel that they should, that they need to. That they can't trust anything else. But other people, and I would guess that it's most people, use that kind of software because they can't use anything else. In order to make use of a web office suite feasible, for example, you need a fast, always-on network connection, that is as reliable as your need/desire to use the software. This is only recently coming to the majority of people on this planet - and consequently, software as a service is only just now picking up speed.
Finally, in some cases, it will make more sense to lease some software short-term for a specific project than to purchase it - to cover short-term needs that are not solved by your current software.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"