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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."
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.
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.