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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.
That's right. I download it for free. :P
My humor is probably your flamebait
What, exactly, is the internet's competition? Internet II? Minitel? I notice that no-one's offering me a discount to switch from using the internet to "MegaCorp's NEW ULTRAnet! (now with 30% more fiber!)".
Just junk food for thought...
He later when on to say that in the future "no one will own cars because the public transportation system will be so good. Also, private property will be consolidated and we will live in communes so as to provide cheaper maintenance. I mean, who wants to mow their own lawn."
He even went so far as to say that the concept of marriage will soon be dead. "In the future, everyone will frequent brothels. Anybody who fucks a whore is in fact consuming a service. They are contributing to a larger-scale brothel rather than them marrying some broad and sticking her in a house. I mean, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for cheap?"
There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think. -Victor Hugo
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.
(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+