So I think the jury is still out on Jonathan Schwartz, even with yesterdays disappointing earnings statement. The previous three quarters were profitable for Sun (which was a pretty amazing turnaround--Sun was in deep trouble before Schwartz took the helm).
The thing that a lot of folks haven't realized is that the nerds have recaptured the flag within Sun. And, you know what happens when a bunch of nerds are on a mission. That's right: http://tinyurl.com/67user
OK, so maybe putting the nerds in charge isn't a guarantee of success, but it is a prerequisite in a tech company.
Everybody can probably think of one cool thing Sun is doing, because it touches on your specific area...but when you do an aerial survey of the whole Sun "cool stuff" landscape, it looks really impressive:
Zones - A sweet elastic computing solution. More efficient than Xen (due to different model...more like vservers on Linux, but it's actually stable enough to use), allows quite impressive run-time configuration like scaling resources up and down, etc.
JVM for dynamic languages - Sun has drunk the Koolaid on dynamic languages, and is actively contributed to a bunch of them. I think they are beginning to understand that Java is not the important thing to come out of Sun, but the JVM and that huge library is.
Cheap hardware - Really, you can buy Sun boxes for not too much more than equivalent Dell systems. And, Sun boxes are nice. They don't have as many low-end options as Dell, of course, but once you get into high end gear where Dell loses its huge quantity advantages, Sun is a viable option.
MySQL - Most popular database in the world. Hard to top that for importance in the industry. During web 1.0 they had to team up with Oracle to offer the whole solution...now they've got the full stack.
Caroline - Utility computing, elastic computing, "App Engine", call it what you will...Sun is building a commodity solution to the problem.
Will all of this make up for years of resting on their laurels? I dunno...but it's too early to count them out, and Schwartz seems to have played an important role in the change.
call it what you will...Sun is building a commodity solution to the problem
The problem with Sun is precisely that. They are turning everything into a commodity. This is good if your strategy is to make money on a complementary product.
The thing is: they forget to make money from complementary products. They are commoditizing the software, the hardware and everything they do... but where are they going to sit when the dance stops? Where do they intend to make money?
I just listened to Schwartz speak at Startup Camp a few hours ago and he discussed just that issue...I was surprised by how many folks were questioning him on the subject from different angles. Basically, "why have you made everything free?" (Because they have...nearly everything Sun builds is Open Source, all the way down to the CPU designs.)
His answer was, "because you [startups] wouldn't use it if we didn't". He went on to explain how startups using Sun means that in a year, maybe two or three, when those startups grow into big companies they will need the kind of infrastructure that only Sun (and maybe a couple of other companies) can provide. It made sense when he said it.
They've got a guy talking to startups here in the valley about it for the next several days, and they'll be talking about it at Startup Camp. I must assume that means they are taking it all very seriously.
Schwartz has never mattered. Ever seen anything by him? It's astonishingly obvious that he has no idea how to make money. He does know how to use hip buzzwords, though.
He may be not someone who matters anymore in terms of "money & success", but my bet is on Linus Torvalds -- 100 years later. He is the only one on that list who has created something that is transcendental, wich won't stop after his death because it goes beyond himself and is slowly but surely shaping History, in a virtually unstoppable way.
Oh, and I'm a proud Windows XP user, no fanboyism inside :)
git wholly altered Linus' position in the world of software. It was like George Foreman's comeback, proving that an old dog can learn new tricks and stomp all over the youngsters in the field.
Anybody that's not looking at Linus (for a second time, if you were around for the beginning of Linux, or for the first time) with a sense of wide-eyed amazement just isn't paying attention. He's now helped reinvent two entire industries. git is pretty revolutionary...it builds on the shoulders of giants, just like Linux did previously, but it makes the leap that no one else as made and puts it into a simple package (Mercurial and darcs and bazaar all come close, of course, but all have a "research project" feel to them in several important areas--partly because git came last in the line and could learn from their mistakes, but the same is true of almost every great idea).
I think your argument also works to say that he doesn't matter (by design), in that his project can continue with or without his active participation.
If you read the kernel mailing list, there is sometimes the question of "what happens if Linus gets hit by a bus?" He always says that it shouldn't adversely affect development... :)
I think they are 100% wrong about Facebook being an also ran. The author is coming from the perspective of a large corporation type and fails to see that not selling out and not compromising your ideals will win in the long term. The author would have put Craigslist's founder up on that list and a few years ago Larry Page and Sergey Brin for not selling out when they had the chance.
I think he's 100% correct, Zuckerberg should have taken the money and ran while Facebook was hot, because in the end, it's a fad, and worth no where near what it's hyped to be. Craigslist and Google aren't fads, they're massively useful sites for everyone, unlike Facebook. Facebook was never in the league of a Google, EVER.
Yes, they were obviously way off with that one. Facebook has grown enormously in the past two years, and they would have no trouble selling for many times more than the $750M that he turned down.
The great thing about these old articles is that with the benefit of history we can see wrong they are, which should tell us something about the current "news".
Their argument is really that MySpace has already won. There may be some truth to that - MySpace is about 4 times bigger by the numbers, and in most other industries, 80% market share = winner. It's hard for us to see that because we're from the demographic that tends to use FaceBook, but remember that 2/3 of Americans don't even go to college, let alone use a social networking site centered around the college experience.
I can kinda see FaceBook vs. MySpace as being today's Apple vs. Microsoft (or IBM) battle. FaceBook's cultivated a sort of elite brand - "we're better than Myspacers simply because we're on FaceBook". But remember that Microsoft eventually won: the masses, by definition, are far more numerous than the elite.
I can kinda see FaceBook vs. MySpace as being today's Apple vs. Microsoft (or IBM) battle... Microsoft eventually won: the masses, by definition, are far more numerous than the elite.
To say that Microsoft "won" is to be mired in zero-sum, winner-take-all thinking. If you can look at Apple Computer's earnings reports and see a company that has "lost", you're smoking something.
Microsoft is profitable, Apple is profitable. And the masses may outnumber the elite, but the elite has a lot more disposable income per capita.
There's no reason why both MySpace and FaceBook cannot "win" simultaneously.
I'm curious where you get the "MySpace is about 4 times bigger" number? My understanding was that Facebook had grown to be larger than MySpace in some foreign markets, and that it was about half the size in the US. It is still firmly in second place--MySpace usage is still growing roughly on pace with Facebook so Zeno gets his revenge--but certainly more than 25% as popular as MySpace.
I'm not saying Facebook is worth 15 billion (that'd be stupid...I'm talking Stave Ballmer level stupid), but one can't say they've lost to MySpace, when the market is still wide open worldwide, and Facebook seems to know how to execute internationally than MySpace.
But, I think Facebook will lose, in the end, to a few dozen companies that build a better garden without the walls. Each will be smaller than Facebook, but they'll end the reign of Facebook and MySpace with a wholly different process of social networking. (I think a single destination "social portal" is as doomed to failure as the whole web 1.0 "portal" idea turned out to be...portals will always be less interesting than the whole Internet, so when the whole Internet is socially enabled the social portals will falter. The oracle has spoken.)
It was based on a userbase of 80 million for MySpace (from the article) and 20 million for FaceBook (which I'd heard as of about spring '07). However, apparently FaceBook has now grown past at least 30 million (http://www.insidefacebook.com/2007/07/10/facebook-rockets-pa...), and may be more now. So it's probably more like a factor of 2 or 3 now. My information was out of date, sorry.
Edit: actually, the MySpace numbers are out of date too, so if they've grown at the same rate, MySpace should still be 4x bigger.
And I agree that the future of social networking is probably something that hasn't been invented yet. The market is maybe 5 years old, which is about the same age as search when Google started kicking ass. My startup is actually in the running, so I've got a vested interest in FaceBook failing, but we've got so far to go that I don't even dare to hope...
Yes, but Blu-Ray sales are actually down, even since they won. They're getting beaten by upscaling DVD players and conventional DVDs.
The high player prices, high disc prices, and player incompatibilities have created a situation where most people simply don't see the value in Blu-Ray.
I think Ken Kutaragi even in hindsight deserved to be in the list. He's since left Sony and made many major missteps which are likely causes to the PS3 not being the dominant market leader.
I love how one of the others on that list is some consultant for the hd-dvd promotion group. (then again, he apparently pushed for dvd adoption, which was a smart thing)
