Perspective: Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems
Excerpts and paraphrasing from a conversation with Jonathan Schwartz, CEO, Sun Microsystems.
Q: As part of the top to bottom review of Sun, what have you learned about what’s going on in the tech world.
A: There are two things that put this in context. IT is moving to a phase where there is divergence – Oracle or SAP? Looking at Sun’s ERP implementation, the whole company will run on one infrastructure. Then there is connectivity. Everyone is trying to connect to their communities of interest. They want to talk to us about connecting to the marketplace. We have to choose which products to build, which markets to focus on. As companies look to IT, they divide into two segments: Those who view it as a cost center are a trivial small portion. Or those that look at IT and tech as a means to drive value.
Q: When everything is getting cheaper, how do you compete?
A: Commodity companies like Exxon and Google, will only the most valuable companies in the world, only if they can leverage R&D. If your only strategy is to lower price to get customers, you’ll have a grim future. But if R&D lets you differentiate, there is plenty of opportunity out there. The demand for what we build will never diminish.
Q: How do you prioritize the R&D
A: We focus on energy efficiency because energy is a huge cost. We focus on security and provisioning, because the way we deployed the internet today is inefficient and complex. We’ll be less focused on building consumer devices and services, we’ll be focused on driving standards that connect us to the market and monetize that.
Q: Web 2.0 to describe what’s going today. Does that resonate?
A: The web is no longer real. Rather than having a hub, the spokes are now connected to each other. All client devices within the next 3-5 years will be functionally identical. The apps will run identically across all your devices. Innovation won’t slow down, but a uniform infrastructure will create the broadest market.
Q: Do you have to be open in way IT vendors haven’t traditionally been?
A: When we developed Java, we used the Java community process to drive development. We put consumer reviews of our products on our web site, even if they trash us. We’re going to focus on allowing our customers to drive development.
Q: Some say every CEO should blog. You do. But not a lot of others.
A: Five years ago there were CEOs who didn’t do email. The job of any leader is to communicate the vision of the company, your passion for the company. Whether it’s a blog or a weekly column. Blogs are very efficient. I want to stay connected to a diffuse marketplace. We have two constituents: the CIO, who is making fewer decisions. And the developers. They hang out on the web, they look at what you have to say. That’s the constituency that can transform Sun’s business.
Q: Robert Scoble said Bill Gates decided not to blog, so people would listen to Microsoft employee bloggers instead.
A: I disagree. I don’t have the best read blog at Sun. I don’t have a monopoly on communicating on behalf of Sun. The guy who blogs about Java has readers who don’t want to listen to me.
Q: What competitors are you most concerned about?
A: We have such incredible demand, I’m not worried about the competition. I’m focused on how to communicate the message to the market. When you look at the scale of where people are going on the internet and how they spend their time, it’s incredibly complex (e.g., the amount of time adults spend on immersive games). Adwords on Google aren’t going to cut it. You have to worry about where to reach your constituents.
Q: What is the potential of massively multiplayer games.
A: When you have an industry that size, that drives a ton of infrastructure. That will drive innovation to deliver. It will be great for Sun’s market.
Q: There seems to be no market research any more. Why is there no description of the workloads that are growing faster than Moore’s Law?
A: Industry analysts can no longer rely upon their brand as a conduit for data. There are people doing the research, but they’re not necessarily the name research houses.
Q: The operating system platform has changed, based on how people use their computers. Where is that going to evolve?
A: You have operating systems for your watch, camera, phone, computer. We put billions of dollars in R&D into building operating systems for our servers. There has been a tremendous amount of change in the network side. That’s separate from the devices, which will converge. How many different OS do you need? You can get content on any device you use. We’re not done with R&D based on how people will use networks.
Q: If you were starting a company now, what would you do?
A: Barriers to entry in tech are high. The barrier to start a business in consumer network services is nothing. Look at ring tone sales. That’s pure profit, based on a digital snippet. If I started a company tomorrow, I’d figure what services consumers are going to most.
Q: What metrics do you use to cut through the hype and identify the real trends?
A: The era of custom hardware is on its way out. When you look at how fast our general purpose servers have become, that simplifies what we need to build. Now we have storage devices that can run apps, because they run on Solaris. We can rebuild out of Sun components. As we prioritize what we do, we’ll move after large scale, horizontally scalable workloads that are growing faster than Moore’s Law. On the consumer side, we’ll focus on ensuring any device that touches the network can interact with the network.
