"10 people who don't matter" -- 2 years later.
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
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 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?
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.
Oh, and I'm a proud Windows XP user, no fanboyism inside :)
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... :)
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 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.
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 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.)
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...
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".
It may take a few years, and it'll be because of a super slowdown in the market outside of SV, but mark my words, it will happen.
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.