Filed under: social software

Filed under: AJAX, collaboration

Filed under: social networking, social software, social news

Filed under: search engines, social networking, reputation

Filed under: mapping, mashups

Filed under: companies, web 2.0

Filed under: companies, e-commerce

• First, if people wanted more in depth discussion - wouldn't the product descriptions and the buyer/seller feedback be less mass produced than they are now?  "Great customer!  Would sell to again for sure!" over and over again.  What percentage of the auction pages are mass produced by huge eBay store owners?
• Given that this will be a pure commercial space it seems like the promised land for comment spammers.  Will eBay be able to fight spam in a way that doesn't shut down discussion but works for users?
• Not sure that these mediums are the best suited for this context.  It seems like kind of an awkward application of two very hip, exciting tools.
• Tag support makes sense if implemented in conjunction with pre-selected categories and full text search.  Given the nature of this particular market, though, I wonder if this will be the space where we really see tag spam emerge in a big way for the first time.
• Internationalization of discourse will be an interesting mess to watch, I'm guessing.  Most businesses large enough to do a lot of international business mitigate language and cultural differences by hiring specialists to help with these issues.  Micro-businesses will not have these resources and I'll be curious to see how many miscommunications, previously silent prejudices and other communication issues emerge.
• Business blogging often helps build relationships between companies and their customers.  How much loyalty do you feel to any particular eBay store?  I'm guessing not very much.  Thumbs up, thumbs down on reputation may be enough reputation/communication system for the vast majority of eBay users.
  

Filed under: citizen media, MSM

Filed under: aggregators

One first step could be to examine a variety of leading sites of this type and that is what I've done below. It's arbitrary, it's unscientific and I think it's interesting. Last Friday evening I looked at the front page of 4 interesting memedigger sites and wrote down some numbers. Digg is clearly the standard, but also examined below are Reddit, the Spanish-language site Meneame and Hugg.com, a project of the hugely popular environmental blog Treehugger. I would have liked to include Newsvine, but was unable to find numbers to compare.

An overview of some observations:

• Front page items are more commented on in Reddit than Digg, relative to the number of points those items have recieved.
• Meneame seems to be successful in terms of votes but receives fewer comments.
• Hugg isn't being used very much. I am curious why.

• the total number of points listed for all items on the front page of the site
• the number of items listed
• the age of the oldest and second oldest items on the front page
• the total number of comments listed on the front page
• the estimated number of registered users in the system

• divided the average number of points held by each item on the front page of each service by the estimated number of registered users. This could be called the chance that any single item on the front page was given a point by any single registered users. This may serve to roughly estimate the breadth of participation in the system - a system where the items on the front page have received a relatively large number of votes relative to a relatively small number of users is one where there is greater agreement amongst users about what is important. This number may be more precise if it were calculated with the number of recently active users than total registered users.
• I did the same division as above with the number of comments listed. This may provide some insight into the amount of conversation that occurs on the various sites, at least regarding the items that are on the front page.

Four memediggers compared

Digg

6923 points on 15 items = 461 points per item on the front page

Oldest item listed is from 1 day 3 hours ago, 2nd oldest 21 hours ago.

832 comments = 55 comments per item on the front page.

There appears to be 178,625 total registered users.

Total points on front page divided by total users equals 0.04. That could mean that one out of roughly every 20 registered users has given a point to an item that is now on the front page.

Total comments divided by registered users equals 0.005. That could mean that one out of roughly every 200 registered users has left a comment on an item that is now on the front page.

Notes on Digg:

• There are 5955 pages of users. Users Thuglife and Diggitydank both appear after the 1000th page of most active users, in case you were wondering.
• The nearly 180,000 registered digg users is a far larger number than the 60,000 subscribers to Tech Crunch, lest you use the latter number to measure the impact of Web 2.0.
• Google search for site:http://digg.com/users has aprox 4 to 5 million results.

Reddit

3179 points on 25 items front page = 211 points per item

There are several items listed as from 1 day ago.

777 comments = 51 comments per item

Registered users appears to be undisclosed. Reddit representative has said that the site gets tens of thousands of users every day. Google search for site:http://reddit.com/user gets 209,000 results.

Note: Reddit has many additional features beyond news moderation.

Meneame, Spanish-language digg clone on tech

1882 points on 20 items = 94 points per item

Oldest post is 1 day and 10 hours, second oldest 1 day 5 hours.

192 comments on 20 items = 10 comments per item

There appears to be 4940 registered users.

Total points divided by total users = 0.38 That could mean that there is a roughly 40% chance that any single user has given a point to any item that is now on the front page. This could also mean that a high percentage of registered users continue to engage in ongoing use.

Total comments divided by total users = 0.04 That could mean that approximately 1 out of every 20 users have commented on a front page item.

Notes on Meneame:

Google site:http://meneame.net/user.php gets 22,000 results.

There were items with zero and 1 comment on the front page, both with more than 80 votes.

The site also includes a wiki for discussion of the service.

Hugg

92 points on 15 items = 6 comments per post on front page

Oldest item is from 1 day 3 hrs ago, 16 hrs is second oldest.

8 comments on front page.

There are 93 registered users.

Total points on front page divided by total users = .99 That could mean that every user has given a point to an item on the front page. The fact that this is unlikely demonstrates the inadequacy of this formula. I believe it indicates instead that the many of the relatively few active users find almost every item they give a point to appearing on the front page. Clearly the front page is of far less use to these readers than in other systems.

Total front page comments divided by total users = 0.09 That could mean that 1 in ten users have left a comment on an item on the front page. It is likely one or a few users have left more than one of the 8 comments.

Notes on Hugg:

Hugg is a project of the environmental blog Treehugger, for which Technorati has found 9,298 links from 2,943 sites. This indicates that the large Treehugger community is not into Hugg.

Of the 15 items on the front page, all were contributed by a total of 5 users.

One of the items on the front page when I visited was titled Jesus 'healed using cannabis'. I found that funny.

There are loads of big ads on Hugg, including from some of the biggest environmental organizations in the US.

Other memedigger or community moderated news sites that may be of interest:

Muti "Muti is a site inspired by Digg and reddit but dedicated to content of interest to Southern Africans or those interested in Southern Africa." See also the site's cool mashup of Google Maps and Yahoo News on Africa and elsewhere.

Crispynews Crispynews is hosted digg-clone software used by a wide variety of communities of interest. American Idol fans, Mormons, Brazillian hip-hop fans, etc.

Filed under: mashups

Filed under: nptech, social networking

The partnership between the film and the high profile online social network appears to be remarkably low-profile.  No press releases appear on PR Web, few bloggers outside of MySpace have written about it and a Google News search brings back surprisingly few results.  The MySpace community itself appears to be responding well, however, as almost 45,000 users have added the films as a friend to their profile in just less than a week.

Filed under: wireless media

Filed under: RSS

Filed under: blogging

Filed under: IM, nptech, RSS

Filed under: citizen media, podcasting, aggregators

Filed under: social networking

Filed under: Yahoo

Filed under: wireless media

Gordon Cook: How do we get from "here" to "there"? He goes deep here. The killer piece (at the end of a bad link I hope G will fix soon) is Personal Fabrication: a Talk with Neil Gershenfeld of MIT. Neil's work reminds me of my friend Marshall Burns' "Napster fabbing," which he talked about at the first P2P conference.

Windows Live testing video search  —  Windows Live.com is working on some interesting new features in their beta search service, most notably video search.  It's not on the front page yet, but on the section of the site ironically missing the word beta on its logo: beta.search.live.com.

Source:   TechCrunch
Author:   Marshall Kirkpatrick
Link:   http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/24/windows-live…

Techmeme permalink

So over the past couple weeks, spiking yesterday with the release of industry market share numbers showing we outgrew the market (in my new role, I've been counseled, not by our general counsel, to avoid saying "we spanked the market"), I've been getting a lot of questions going the other way - wanting my view on why our peers are shrinking or troubled.

My answer? I have no idea, go ask them. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it.

I can tell you why I believe we are succeeding, however. I do spend a lot of time understanding our pipeline, wins and losses.

We've been saying for a while, for the customers we serve, innovation is about the only thing that matters in winning business. Cost of acquisition is a nit - compared to the cost of operation and management. A cheap Ferrari doesn't help a transport company that needs to move 10,000 people every day. They want a bus.

And no, this message doesn't resonate with everybody. It goes over like a lead balloon when you're selling to a flower shop in a shopping mall. Or a dentist's office or restaurant. They want a cheap box. But that's not our core market, that's someone else's. In my view, they're both going to stop buying infrastructure, anyways. Here's my CRM advice for both: shut down your servers, go directly to salesforce.com. We at Sun will then focus our time on salesforce.com. And believe me, IT matters to them. And they are spanking the market. Sorry, handily outpacing the market.

Secondly, the proprietary and expensive moniker is now dead. Dead dead dead. Solaris is open source, and gaining huge share (to my friends in the analyst community: you should stop saying the x64 market is characterized as a Windows and Linux market - when it's obvious there's a growing Solaris market on x64 systems). SPARC is now open source and gaining its rightful place in the industry standard server market - with Niagara's focus on eco-responsibility and energy efficiency seeming awfully timely. Our new lineup of UltraSPARC IV+ systems are cheaper and faster than IBM's Power systems (one customer just told me, "they're appropriately named when you get your electricity bill.") And our Opteron lineup is just, plain, awe inspiring:

But then there's the most fundamental answer to why we're gaining share.

I was sending out a note of congratulations to one of my staff members this week, when we first got wind of the data. And then I figured, it wasn't just his team, it was both our hardware/systems teams. And our software team for Solaris. And our marketing team, and our global sales and service teams. And our amazing ops team. And the corporate functions keeping the wheels on the bus while we're restructuring it. It was every one inside Sun, and all our supporters in the market.

Great products take great teams to gain share. So why'd we gain share?

We had a few good people focused on it. It's amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it.

And just in case you missed the news, here's a couple good articles:

Sun's server sales soar, while Dell bores in Q2 -- The Register
Sun Overtakes Dell In Worldwide Sever Revenue -- InformationWeek

Filed under: Laptops

Programming challenge:

Write me a function with this signature in C#:

public (unsafe?) long Reverse(long i, int bits)

...to flip the endian-ness (LSB/MSB) of a long, but just the # of significant bits specified.

Example, if the input is 376, with bits=11, the output is 244 (decimal, base 10).

376 = 00000101111000
244 = 00000011110100

Example, if the input is 900, with bits=11, the output is 270.

900 = 00001110000100
270 = 00000100001110

Example, if the input is 900, with bits=12, the output is 540.

900 = 00001110000100
540 = 00001000011100

Example, if the input is 154, with bits=4, the output is 5.

154 = 00000010011010
5   =00000000000101

And make it FAST...;)

Test text.

The official online form for the Apple Battery Recall is here. I filled one out for an iBook and a Powerbook with no troubles, except for actually having to lift up the keyboard for the iBook to find the serial number. The one listed in the "about this mac" section was actually another serial number.

All you need is your laptop's serial number plus your battery's serial number for the first page. On the second page, your personal information such as the address you want the battery to be shipped to.

Word of warning. Make sure you confirm your address is correct before you submit the second page. There's no confirmation page that will say "Are you sure this is correct? Hit back if you are not." If you screw up, you'll probably have to contact Apple again to correct your address. Either that, or camp out at your neighbor's house daily for 4-6 weeks. – Jason Chen

Battery Exchange [Apple]

BoingBoing has covered Mikey Sklar's projects before. He RFID chipped his hand and also built a trampoline controlled flame thrower. He was on The Daily Show yesterday for a segment on nano machines along with Ray Kurzweil.

CC Salon is happening tomorrow – Wednesday, August 9th – from 6-9pm at Shine in San Francisco. CC Salon is a free, casual monthly get-together focused on conversation, networking, and presentations from people or groups who are developing projects that relate to open content and tools. CC Salon SF is now being presented in conjunction with CopyNight SF.

This month's line-up of speakers includes Hemai Parthasarathy and Barbara Cohen of the Public Library of Science, Owen Byrne of Digg, and John Buckman of Magnatune. Shannon Coulter will be DJing a set of CC music from Magnatune's catalogue.

For more information, visit this event's Upcoming.org listing.

Have you missed us? We've missed us too! All of this feedburning business has kept us busy enough to properly ignore our own podcast almost a year (as evidenced by our last episode posting of September, 2005). To all 78 subscribers who've kept their Bics in the air since then: "Hellloooooo, Cleveland!"

Rather than abandon the FeedBurner podcast as we did our innocence of days gone by, we cooked up a better solution. FeedBurner is pleased to announce the customer-sponsored and produced podcast format. While you've been out there doing whatever it is that you do, we have been quietly gathering a growing list of volunteers who have graciously offered to host/produce and contribute to the FeedBurner podcast in some way.

What's the result? More FeedBurner podcasts, more often. But more importantly, this new format means we get to shamelessly promote our customers which makes us very happy (you know how much we like to do that).

We kick off our first, er ... second podcast with the one and only David Lawrence. You can learn more about David and Episode #2 on our dedicated podcast page.

Spend some quality time with cast and crew of FeedBurner and our very talented customer base. Subscribe to the FeedBurner podcast feed today.

Interested in volunteering your time, patience and your skills of an artist to a future episode? Shoot us an email.

We've made some room for Matt Blumberg at the big fancy table in the back room (the table without the folding legs). Matt is founder, CEO and chairman of Return Path and knows a wee bit about Internet services with 7 years of experience helping marketers increase email ROI and having previously served as General Manager of the Internet division of MovieFone, Inc. from inception to the company's sale to AOL. He also has a deep appreciation and understanding for delivering content to the far-flung reaches of the Internet-o-sphere(TM), so we enthusiastically welcome his contribution to such heated board debates as "Why don't you just TELL me which feed you want burned?" and "Does this feed look fat to you?"

Matt writes a blog about entrepreneurship titled OnlyOnce. He loves earth tones, walks in the park, and the letter P.

In the syndicated content solar system in which the FeedBurner orb spins, it helps to occasionally venture out of our galaxy in search of intelligent life and integrated product offerings. Long story short, we have acquired Blogbeat. In our quest to provide our publishers with a comprehensive picture of how content is distributed and consumed, we liked the fact that Blogbeat uses the feed to gather additional information about the blog. We have been interested in expanding our combined site/feed view since FeedFlare got going some months ago, and Blogbeat will give us the ability to provide publishers with a more thorough statistics picture.

What does this acquisition mean for you?
FeedBurner customers will have a means of comparing feed trends and metrics to site metrics in some interesting and non-traditional ways. By the end of the year, we'll have assimilated... er, incorporated Blogbeat functionality into the familiar FeedBurner platform. If you're a Blogbeat customer, we first welcome you with a full refund since Blogbeat will become a part of StandardStats, our free service. Additional (and optional) paid services will be built out in the future. During the transition, you will continue to be supported by Blogbeat, and we encourage you to take a look around FeedBurner and get used to the joint.

But what about [insert your question here]?
There is a lot more information about this acquisition available in the press release and our official acquisition FAQ.

Apple has launched a streamlined new categorization scheme for podcasts listed in the iTunes Music Store. Somebody wasn't paying attention to our "don't launch changes on a Friday before a holiday" policy, but we'll let it slide this time. We've carved out some room between sleeping and World Cup viewing this US holiday weekend to update our trusty SmartCast service in support of these changes. Below are the set of old --> new category mappings based on the updated category scheme defined by Apple. We have auto-updated all the podcasts in FeedBurner to validate to the new category scheme (and validate through the already updated Feed Validator). If you want to tweak these adjustments to your podcast categories, simply log into your FeedBurner account and visit the "Optimize" tab to access the SmartCast feature.

old -> new
Arts & Entertainment->Arts
Arts & Entertainment|Architecture->Arts|Design
Arts & Entertainment|Books->Arts|Literature
Arts & Entertainment|Design->Arts|Design
Arts & Entertainment|Entertainment->TV & Film
Arts & Entertainment|Games->Games & Hobbies|Video Games
Arts & Entertainment|Performing Arts->Arts|Performing Arts
Arts & Entertainment|Photography->Arts|Visual Arts
Arts & Entertainment|Poetry->Arts|Literature
Arts & Entertainment|Science Fiction->Arts|Literature
Audio Blogs->Society & Culture|Personal Journals
Business|Finance->Business|Business News
Business|Management->Business|Management & Marketing
Business|Marketing->Business|Management & Marketing
Education|Higher Education->Education|Higher Ed
Family->Kids & Family
Food->Arts|Food
Health|Diet & Nutrition->Health|Fitness & Nutrition
Health|Fitness->Health|Fitness & Nutrition
Health|Relationships->Health|Sexuality
International->Society & Culture
International|Australian->Society & Culture
International|Belgian->Society & Culture
International|Brazilian->Society & Culture
International|Canadian->Society & Culture
International|Chinese->Society & Culture
International|Dutch->Society & Culture
International|French->Society & Culture
International|German->Society & Culture
International|Hebrew->Society & Culture
International|Italian->Society & Culture
International|Japanese->Society & Culture
International|Norwegian->Society & Culture
International|Polish->Society & Culture
International|Portuguese->Society & Culture
International|Spanish->Society & Culture
International|Swedish->Society & Culture
Movies & Television->TV & Film
News->News & Politics
Politics->News & Politics
Public Radio->News & Politics
Religion & Spirituality|New Age->Religion & Spirituality|Spirituality
Science->Science & Medicine
Sports->Sports & Recreation
Talk Radio->News & Politics
Technology|Computers->Technology|Tech News
Technology|Developers->Technology|Tech News
Technology|Information Technology->Technology|Tech News
Technology|News->Technology|Tech News
Technology|Operating Systems->Technology|Tech News
Technology|Smart Phones->Technology|Tech News
Technology|Text/Speech->Technology|Tech News
Transportation->Games & Hobbies|Automotive
Transportation|Automotive->Games & Hobbies|Automotive
Transportation|Aviation->Games & Hobbies|Aviation
Transportation|Bicycles->Sports & Recreation|Outdoor
Transportation|Commuting->Games & Hobbies|Automotive
Travel->Society & Culture|Places & Travel

Any questions about the new categorization scheme? Those should go to Apple. These changes were rolled into production and publicly announced by Apple on Friday; we have tried to react to the change as quickly as possible for our podcasters.

Any compliments about our SmartCast feature? Direct those to our Support Forums or email feedback at feedburner dot com.

Love, us

The developers at FeedBurner have been acting like a bunch of kids in the back of a station wagon lately ... "When's our next Hackathon?! Tell Chris to stop touching me!" After our last two successful endeavors, the Hackathon has become the anticipated event of the season here at FeedBurner HQ. One day spent exclusively working on pet projects that aren't on the Gantt chart. It's just like a Google engineer's "20% time," except, well, this is our third one in about a year, so let's call it "FeedBurner's 1.41% time."

This past Friday, June 16th, we all showed up in the conference room early in the morning, proposed our ideas, and came up with the gameplan. We then went immediately into "can't talk now" mode, frantically coding for an end-of-day presentation. When the buzzer sounded, the pizza and beer went down fast as everyone showed off their hacks, captivating the room and eliciting tears of joy from the business team who no longer had to run customer support for the day (if somebody answered your question on Friday using the word Adam instead of Atom, please resubmit your question).

While all of this is a lot of fun for us, it's usually a lot more fun for publishers when we get to unveil a bunch of new features, tweaks and services all at once. Here they are, as described by the developers themselves:

Our crack design team is at it again, this time having raised a cloud of dust around this very blog: Burning Questions. Once they sanded down the aging outer layer, they revealed something that looks a lot more like us: Fresh and feedy. While we realize that nothing shouts "Confidence!" quite like a pile of blue matchsticks, we felt that replacing them with bright, shiny, useful links and much-needed information might benefit both our casual and dedicated Burning Questions readership a bit more.

Highlights of our new design include a lot more about us and our goings-on (it is our blog, after all). We've attempted to bring some of the popular sections of our Web site front and center. Check out the following hotness:

• Publisher Buzz
• The company Flickr feed
• Recent media coverage
• Upcoming Events
• Press Releases
• An open call to help us resurrect the FeedBurner podcast (if you would like to produce the show, drop us a note)

We've been working closely with our friends at Six Apart to improve the connection between TypePad blogs and FeedBurner feeds, and lo, the integration is complete. Starting today, you can choose to connect your TypePad feed to FeedBurner, thereby taking advantage of all of the subscriber measurement and feed promotion tools that are there for the taking. You can also disconnect your feed from FeedBurner just as easily. Chocolate and peanut butter aside, we think this integration is pretty tasty.

What This Means for You
If you are a current FeedBurner customer publishing a TypePad blog, you can now get the full picture of your audience's size. Subscribers who may receive updates from your native TypePad feed can join the subscribers to your FeedBurner feed to become one big happy family, viewable in its entirety from your trusty FeedBurner charts. (CAUTION: Joining these feeds may cause your subscriber numbers to increase!) New TypePad customers — from individual bloggers to the growing number of Fortune 500 corporations and media companies using TypePad Business Class — can set up this connection during the initial blog configuration process.

Getting Connected
Just log into your TypePad account and select the "Feeds" option from the Configure tab of the application. Six Apart has created a few simple screens that walk you through the drama-free process of "connecting" your feed to FeedBurner. Once you've completed the connection, you can log in to your FeedBurner account to take advantage of all that feed management goodness.

I Have a Question of the Tech Support Nature...
We've put together a nice little FAQ with answers to questions we think you might have. If your questions have more to do with the TypePad side of things, please start with Michael Sippey's post at Everything TypePad. Also, much like New York pizza, our Support Forums are open for business around the clock and the answers you receive inevitably taste better warmed up the next day.

Enough with the food chatter already. Salut!

UPDATE 6/22: Six Apart integrates additional FeedBurner services into the TypePad platform.

• FeedFlare: You no longer have to roll up your sleeves and dig into your TypePad template to use our popular FeedFlare service. Now, there is one-click addition of FeedFlare to standard TypePad templates. Behold the simple configuration process. Once configured, log into your FeedBurner account and customize which FeedFlare units appear in your feed and on your site.
• Ping Us: If you've connected your TypePad feed to FeedBurner and enabled TypePad's Publicity tools, TypePad will automatically notify FeedBurner when you make updates to your blog. Check it out.

The office stereo is cranked up to eleven this morning to welcome our latest customer, Geffen Records. With a date like 06/06/06 upon us, the office flashpot could finally see some use should Rob Zombie drop in on us.

Geffen recently launched a feed-driven refresh to its Web site that essentially automates the viral methods artists like the good Mr. Zombie, and many others, leverage to launch their records. From Mary J. Blige to Counting Crows to Rufus Wainwright and many more, Geffen's new feeds help establish a direct line of communication between the artists and their fan base. You can now subscribe directly to your favorite band's feed and receive the latest news, tour dates, videos and more.

Geffen's early trials proved that feeds were the marketing tool that garnered the highest conversions. Feed subscribers were four times more likely to take action (e.g. download wallpaper, play audio/video clips, sign up for a message board, etc.) than those reached through more traditional methods. Recognizing the growing audience that will no doubt follow the launch of the next generation of browsers, Geffen wanted to lay the groundwork for a company-wide embrace of feeds to ensure they're able to leverage this new medium. That's where we come in. We meaning, you know, FeedBurner.

Instant Community, Integrated Web Services
Geffen will be taking advantage of FeedFlare to help connect fans with artists. Because FeedFlare is an extensible service, Geffen can create custom links that encourage direct participation from fans. Via items in the feed, fans can rate the latest Nelly Furtado album on iTunes. Or, become a MySpace friend of emerging artist, Matt White. Geffen's feeds will include links that go beyond the artist's content and embrace the communities that have grown in support of the band. As new services develop, Geffen can easily add them using FeedFlare, letting fans know that the artists' feeds will always be the best place to go to find the latest and greatest.

But wait, there's more! It's one thing to be Mary J. Blige's label. She has a loyal (and large) following, and plenty of opportunities to gain new fans. (Like that recent performace on American Idol.) What about new, emerging artists? Geffen's partnering with us to reach the 8 million subscribers who read feeds in the FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN), so that they can advertise emerging artists who will catch the discerning eye of particular demographics.

Using feeds to promote feeds? The engineering team here thinks that has a wonderfully recursive sound to it. Our marketing director just says it rocks.

The engineers at the FeedBurner Statistics Lab (across the street and down the hill from the FeedBurner Wellness Center) are pleased to present new enhancements to our free StandardStats feed traffic service. And the winners are:

Yesterday's News
Historical subscriber tracking is now live. Want to see how many NewsGator subscribers you have today compared to a week ago? Or MyYahoo? Or iTunes? Yesterday, no way. Today, yes way! The service launches with 5 days' worth of history (starting May 18th) and will work into the future as long you choose to use FeedBurner (remember that we make it easy to leave FeedBurner should you decide you're fed up with all of the free stuff).

The new Subscriber history feature acts much like the stats you know today; just use the date widget at the top of the subscribers page to view your subscriber breakdown from a date in the past. Calculating stats for display should be much faster. By the way, excellent use of the semi-colon in the first sentence of this paragraph (you know, considering we're computer people).

Bonus: The number listed in your subscriber chicklet is now time period synched to the number in the analyze tab. Marvel at the consistency!

Live Hits
Second on the list of new features addresses your need for more immediate data. We now offer a feature called "Live Hits" which you'll find on the Analyze tab below the Subscriber menu item. Wondering how many people have been knocking about your feed just now? Check out this listing of the last 25 hits to your feed displayed by date, time and user agent. This new feature is a running tally that includes everything from subscriber hits to browsers to bots accessing your feed. See an example of what Live Hits looks like for our feed:

Count and be happy.

There are lists you just don't want to find yourself on. Like "Worst Dressed (If You Were Trying)," or "Likelier than Not to Stamp Those License Plates." (We've stayed clear of both thus far, though the former is well within reach). However, there are lists that come along that demand much more favorable attention. One such destination is the Red Herring 100.

Here is a group of private technology firms in North America that have been recognized by Red Herring for their part in "Driving the Future of Technology." Editors identify new and innovative technology firms and entrepreneurs that are changing the way we live and work (they spotted Google and eBay in their early days).

This year, FeedBurner makes the list and we'd be totally fibbing if we said we weren't stoked about it. In fact, there was much rejoicing. You can read more about this award in the be-all/end-all source of news: The Press Release. Also, be sure to visit Red Herring for the latest on innovation, technology, financing and entrepreneurial activity.

We'll pause now to enjoy this recognition. — Smartly Accessorized Pause Here — Now, back to innovating!

It's been almost a month since we launched FeedBurner Email. The aforementioned system's chief architect returned from vacation, took one look what the kids had done to the place, and immediately set about restoring order. That said, we have appreciated the positive response to this service from our publishers, long-timers and newcomers alike, and today we fulfilled the number one request: subscriber list management. Now, in the Email Subscriptions service area for your email-enabled feed, you may:

• View a sortable list of all of your subscribers and their status: active, unverified (they requested a subscription but have not yet activated it), or bounced (their address doesn't work)
• Export this list in Microsoft Excel or Plain Text (CSV) format
• Manage individual subscriber activation status

Back in the early '90s, when many of us were impressionable young college students, we got our hands on the first issue of Wired. In those days, we weren't even sure this Internet thing was here to stay. But here was a magazine that was different. Stories about cell phone hacking. Military technology. They published the authors' email addresses. We were hooked.

So it's pretty great that all these years later, we get to report that Wired News is running its feeds through FeedBurner. Like other publishers who use FeedBurner's advanced analytics to measure their audience, better understand feed consumption, and build their online community, Wired News is leveraging the full suite of FeedBurner services to make feeds more integral to their content strategy.

As a part of the FeedBurner Ad Network, Wired News is already generating revenue, and is using FeedBurner services like FeedFlare to survey its audience to gain greater insight into its audience demographics. For those who think Wired News is just tech news (their tech headlines feed *is* great), you're missing out on some of the best original reporting on Culture, Politics, Games and more on the web. Read more about this news in today's press release.

This morning, we unveiled another enhancement to our advertising platform: a feed-driven approach to positioning ads on Web sites and blogs. The feed is the keystone to publisher content; by managing the feed and providing the FeedFlare service, the FeedBurner Ad Network sees context and structure normally unavailable or rendered ambiguous by simply screen-scraping the Web page.

We talk a lot about feed meta data around here, and it tends to result in a loss of dating opportunities, but it's this extra context that's available via the feed that provides the framework for new and better ad units. Ads that shift to the latest permalinks on a site, ads that only appear/disappear once a post has comments, serialized campaigns on a page that understand page/article sequence, etc. The first planned site campaigns powered via the feed will start running in a couple weeks, and we'll go from there. You can read more about this launch in our press release and in the news.

While we have been saying a lot about the ad network lately, we have been working hard on our full suite of free services, and we have a couple other updates to announce over the next week, including more integrated email management and added historical subscription metrics. We continue to not get to the bottom of the "things to build for publishers" list, and great suggestions keep on coming in, so we'll keep shovelling and you keep writing, recording, and filming.

Our hardworking and talented design team has put the finishing touches on our new Web site. While the old FeedBurner page was beginning to have a certain retro feel to it, we felt it was time to streamline a few things around here.

Right away, you'll notice that the new site looks a lot more like the FeedBurner application. This was done so that when you come to FeedBurner, you feel like you are at FeedBurner, a sensation that provides a wonderful sense of logical consistency. We also created a bit more content specific to our various customer categories, including bloggers, podcasters/videocasters and commercial publishers. There is still more to come, including the official adoption of the company blog, Burning Questions, into the family.

A few highlights of the redesign include:

• A rare glimpse into the backgrounds of select FeedBurner execs
• Fast facts and stats
• Event calendar
• Recent media coverage and awards
• FeedBurner Fotos (our official and yet currently underwhelming Flickr feed)

Let us know what you think of the makeover and if you find any broken links or other weirdness.

On the heels of our first announcement on the topic, we follow up with the availability of a self-service interface designed to make the ad-buying process easier for advertisers. The new self-service tools provide a quick way to bypass human contact and purchase media directly via the FeedBurner Web site. If you are a media buyer, ad agency or marketer looking to participate in this new medium, this is the place.

Publisher Impact
The launch of these new tools will help us support our primary goal to provide value-add services for content publishers. More advertiser demand means more money-making opportunties for participating publishers. As always, participation is optional and publishers get the final say as to what ads, if any, run in their feeds. The approval process is automated and integrated into your existing feed management dashboard. A full list of Publisher FAQs is available in our Support Forums.

Get Started Now
Learn more about our available channels, view a list of participating publishers, check out current ad specifications and even watch a short demo (1:50, 2.8MB) on how to set up a campaign.

Our self-serve tools are supported by a very friendly Ad Operations team. Questions? Get in touch through all of the regular means including email, shortwave radio, etc.

We will continue to focus on and expand this part of the toolset for publishers and advertisers over the course of the next 8 to 12 weeks, culminating in a suite of services this summer about which we are so excited we can barely contain ourselves. More to come.

I love the humor and mischief in Sun. It's one of the things that drew me here long before I joined the company, and one of the things I really appreciate about our culture. But frankly, it's one of the things that's gotten close to being rinsed away by years of cost cutting.

So I'd like to officially declare, herewith, a rebirth of fun at Sun. Good, cheap, drive the other guys up a wall, fun. And to that end...

You may have read about a very interesting art project. Some enterprising artists decided to mix technology and art, to create likenesses of technology industry titans, attach a Java phone to the sculptures, and set them free to find their way home. The project relied upon the kindness of strangers. Public spirited individuals that contributed to the return of the artwork to its rightful destination would leave their email address on the back of the artwork, and receive a percentage of the proceeds from the sale of the sculptures.

The Java phone enabled the sculptures to be tracked via a service operator, Accutracking, and via Google maps. You can read about the technical details here, and track animated maps of each piece's progress.

Now, not everyone thought this was a cool idea. When presented with the opportunity to purchase the likeness of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, it having made the trek from the printer ink section of a San Jose Office Depot, our friends at HP elected not to honor their founders. So out of respect for HP's legacy, the fine folks in Sun's marketing team decided to acquire the artwork. Bill and Dave are absolute legends, held in the deepest respect by all of us at Sun. We were honored at the opportunity.

So we bought them, and their garage, for $6,000. Lock, stock and Java phone.

And what better way of demonstrating the strength of our partnership than with a picture:

With nearly 25% of Solaris downloads requested on to HP's servers, we know their customers really want the partnership, and we're happy to oblige.

To warn you in advance, Bill and Dave have both indicated a strong interest in learning more about Sun and the Solaris platform, so stay tuned. We're putting together a global tour. Maybe even some new t-shirts.

The state also takes energy efficiency seriously - if you drive a hybrid or high efficiency car, you can use the carpool lane on highways. If you put solar panels on your rooftop, you can qualify for rebates. This isn't about political correctness, it's about working within constraints, driving sustainable development and lessening environmental footprints. It's not politically correct, it's economically correct.

So I was particularly pleased to see us announce that PG&E will give rebates to California businesses for jettisoning our competitors products, and replacing them with more efficient Niagara machines, our UltraSPARC T1000 or T2000 servers. We are the first company to have met the requirements that prove the outstanding efficiency of our datacenter infrastructure. Moving off our competition and onto Sun saves money, power, space, and lessens the impact the IT industry has on the environment. And now it's not just us saying that, it's the Pacific Gas and Electric company, the state's largest power utility.

If you ever get asked by a cynic, or your management "what's the real value of being green?," I can give you a very specific answer, at least for Sun. In the State of California, it's worth $700 to $1000 per server. I did say per server. Every single bid we're in across the state just got $700 to $1,000 per server more competitive.

With ASP's under $5,000 for a Niagara machine, that's not a little competitive push.

That's real power.

As you know, I'm a big believer in the transparency blogging drives for me and Sun. Driving information to the marketplace - all employees at Sun can speak their minds and clarify our strategies and perspectives, rather than having a pundit or competitor talk over us. And in reverse, driving information in to Sun - if there are problems to be found in our business, I'd just as soon they were in the open, rather than hidden away. We (and true, the rest of the world) can see and fix problems first, rather than letting those uninterested in fixing the problems take advantage of their existence (whether competitors or litigants). Sunlight's a great disinfectant.

As a CEO who blogs, the most frequent question I get is, "doesn't this drive your lawyers nuts?" And as I've said, no. Our legal team understands, guides, drives - and protects - our business. All without sneaking into phone booths to change costume. And with technology, regulation and our products all colliding in the marketplace (is it legal to scream "SOX!" in a theater filled with CEO's?), I sleep better at night knowing they're actively engaged.

If you want evidence that navigating today's business environment requires careful thinking, consider one particularly ironic issue: posting material information about Sun on my blog, including information about our business results, runs the risk of violating something called Regulation Full Disclosure, or Reg FD. The regulation's goal is to ensure broad, non-exclusionary distribution of material information to the investing public. And somehow, my blog isn't deemed to be such a non-exclusionary distribution vehicle (but a press release, or the Wall Street Journal is). Reg FD is something we're going to be discussing with Commissioner Cox at the SEC (whose views seem to parallel ours - the more transparency the better).

Are our lawyers in the way? The opposite, they're driving the change. Want proof?

Very quietly, this week, our General Counsel - the senior most lawyer in all of Sun - started a blog. It's here. He, too, is now the only member of his tribe, the only GC in all the Fortune 500 to have a blog.

Now the real question should be (especially if you know Mike), am I worried about what he's going to say?

(Joke, Mike, take a joke.)

I and a few other Silicon Valley leaders were honored to host the first visit ever for a British Prime Minister to Silicon Valley. And he fit right in (wardrobe aside, but he's a world leader after all, and asking him to dress down for Silicon Valley would be like asking Steve Jobs to skip blue jeans and a black shirt - morally objectionable to someone).

The conversation ranged across a variety of topics, from education to cultural competitive advantage, to the government's engagement in delivery of social services via the network.

We only really had an hour together, so I thought I'd jot down a few of the vignettes from our discussion.

The Prime Minister wanted advice on advancing the United Kingdom's position in Europe for research and development. Nearly everyone in the room referenced Stanford and Berkeley's role in making the Valley attractive - as a source of graduates, to be sure, but more as a revolving door for research, partnership, education, dialog. I reminded the Prime Minister that the "SUN" in our ticker symbol, "SUNW" stands for Stanford University. John Hennessy made an interesting reference, quite serious I think, to Stanford's now looking toward the philanthropy of its graduates as a far more lucrative source of return on its intellectual property then traditional licenses or royalties.

I took a quick poll to prove a point - nearly everyone in the room was a product of public school education (myself included). So the opportunities weren't isolated to higher education. (Mr. Jobs followed up to make the reality more painful - showing how few of us were sending our children to public school.)

And lastly, there was a discussion of wage rates and cost of living on the desirability of an economy for R&D.

My point - shared by many in the room, but not all - was that Silicon Valley's (and certainly Sun's) business is largely insensitive to the price of labor on the world market. As one of my staff members said recently, "when it comes to hiring, this ain't Costco, we don't buy in bulk." If we can bring a product to market three or six or twelve months earlier than planned, wage rates as a percentage of total return aren't even measurable in calculating returns. (What was Bill Joy's starting salary? My point... who cares.)

So if you want to attract companies like Sun to your economy, focus on investing in education, in your students, and in your leaders. Focus on educating your policy makers as to why you're committed to education - not to build presitigious institutions, but to invest in progress, academic as well as economic. Focus on the value of broad based talent as a competitive weapon, don't be distracted by cost reducing labor.

So on behalf of Sun, and our little corner of Silicon Valley, I laud the Prime Minister for taking the time out of a very difficult schedule to visit Silicon Valley. It took courage and time.

What we all recognize to be the basic ingredients of progress.

If you've seen the press release, you know we had a good fourth quarter to close out our 2006 fiscal year.

This is now my first full quarter as CEO - and I'm pleased with our progress. Our basic restructuring is underway (that's what the big charge was), and we showed some good growth on the top line. We're seeing a lot of demand, which showed up as revenue that beat Wall Street estimates, very solid bookings, and good deferred (future) revenue.

So I thought I'd add some color to our numbers, and put some of our competitor's comments into context. Answering the questions surrounding "why'd you grow when others were having a hard time?"

First, the market is growing.

We see no global slowdown in IT. Despite what one competitor said. Our key customers (those that view information technology as a competitive advantage, not a cost center) are continuing to invest. They're investing to drive on-line relationships, fuel competitive advantage, and drive efficiencies - but mostly they're investing because they see a return.

We saw especially good demand in our computer systems business (which grew in a quarter where some of our biggest competitors shrank) - and especially on the low end/high volume segment of our product line. Our newest Niagara UltraSPARC systems surpassed the $100M per quarter mark, just about the fastest ramp of any product I can remember. Our Galaxy x64 systems grew way faster than many of our x86 peers (and that was before the big launch that redefined our product set), and we grew our StorageTek business faster than their standalone history - which means we're seeing revenue synergies. We closed several great embedded Java platform deals, too, with three of the largest consumer electronics companies.

That said, I'm definitely seeing the enterprise PC business slow down. Corporate users are putting off new PC's until Vista comes into view, while consumers (witness booming results from Motorola, Nokia and Apple) are biasing away from PC's for really great consumer devices. (Ask a teenager which they'd prefer, a new phone, or a new PC...)

Phones powered by Java technology, Blu Ray DVD players (I saw my first in a Sony store this weekend), XM Radios, Vonage phones - those devices, in aggregate, will radically outship PC's over the coming year. And as a result, they'll drive more growth in demand for network infrastructure than PC's. (Phones aren't just for phone calls, after all.) So as we've been saying for a while, adoption of the Java platform is a leading indicator of Sun's business - just like more lightbulbs drive demand for bigger generators (even if you don't own the lightbulb factory).

Second, choice matters - we're opening new doors.

Greater than 60% of the customers we're meeting through our Try and Buy program are new to Sun. (Well above my expectations.) We exceeded the 5 million license mark for Solaris 10 in Q4 - the majority running on Dell, HP and IBM computers. (Go ahead, read that sentence again, I always read it twice.) We're reaching out beyond Sun's traditional hardware base, and beyond the world of proprietary software - to customers we may never have otherwise met, who now want to talk to us about network identity, data management and business integration. Frankly, Dell, HP and IBM are now channel partners. Please quote me.

And the addition of Ubuntu Linux on our SPARC servers means we're now talking to leading edge Linux customers about consolidating outdated infrastructure. Add in to the mix that we run Windows on our Galaxy x64 systems, and that we routinely attach and support StorageTek systems on IBM mainframes - it's all upside for Sun's customers, and Sun's shareholders. Choice drives opportunity. And customer acquisition.

Third, innovation matters more than price.

Being cheap (or cutting corners on components) doesn't matter as much as delivering value and innovation. A 230 MPH supercar that gets 9 miles to a $4 gallon of gas, isn't nearly as interesting to today's consumer as a Tesla - that uses electricity at a cost of about 1 cent/mile (and appears to outperform most supercars, and yes, I'd like to own one, and no, I haven't convinced my wife). And Niagara is to Tesla as [competitor here] is to an outdated supercar. (And again, if you'd like to try a FREE NIAGARA for 60 days, - we pay return postage if you don't like it.)

Datacenters have to focus on operational cost as much as acquisition price - that's a design priority for Sun. That you don't have to service our newest x4500 (Thumper) storage, but can instead let drives fail in place and just reclaim the space once a year, makes it more competitive than what a hobbyist can build for $1.9/gigabyte. That we can do it in four rack units, at <$2/gig, while running plain vanilla Solaris on the machine - matters a ton to a customer that wants to manage 500 of them. More than it might to a hobbyist who wants to put one in his den (have I mentioned that's an expensive demographic to please?).

Lastly, execution matters.

I want to congratulate and thank the worldwide operations teams - who got us through our ROHS and WEEE transitions without a scratch. If there were an award for smooth execution, you'd get it folks.

And to the sales and service organizations for delivering on Q4 for us and our customers - you did a fantastic job, challenges and all. And remember, lots of demand is a first class problem to have (painful and tiring though it may be when you're wading through it...).

I'm feeling great about our competitive position, about getting our basic restructuring in place, and great about the market opportunity. So much so, we're having a debate internally about bringing back one of our taglines, "We're the Dot in Dot Com." Or refreshed, "We're the Dot in 2.0."

So, what do you think? Comments welcome :)

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Safe Harbor Statement: This blog entry contains predictions, projections and other forward-looking statements regarding Sun's expected future financial results and business opportunities. This includes statements regarding demand for our products; growth of and investments in the IT market; revenue synergies from our acquisitions; increased demand for network infrastructure; and our market opportunity. Our actual future results may be very different from our current expectations. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations include: increased competition; failure to rapidly and successfully develop and introduce new products; risks associated with Sun's international customers and operations; reduced spending in the IT market; and failure to successfully integrate acquired companies. We encourage you to read the 10-Ks, 10-Qs and other reports that we file periodically with the SEC for a discussion of these and other risks. We do not currently intend to update these forward looking statements.

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Silicon Valley's hot again. How can I tell? My favorite barometer is a personal one - my commute down either of the the two major highways joining San Francisco and San Jose is as bad as it was in the bubble.

On a less anecdotal note, I've also been spending a lot of time with newly funded startups (and the ballooning ranks of venture and private equity investors). Interest level, and market opportunity, are up, for the innovations that fuel the internet.

On the technology front, one of the most interesting trends I've seen is the near disappearance of custom hardware. I'm not seeing nearly so many ASICS or custom boards built by hardware startups hoping to become the next Sun or Cisco. I was talking to one such company just a couple weeks ago, run by a guy known for having made big investments in custom hardware designs over the years. So I asked "where'd all the ASICS go?"

His response? "The bar's a lot higher today - general purpose products are so fast, we do pretty much everything in software." As Solaris and the systems on which it runs get faster, they're continuing to displace a breadth of specialized solutions in the market, from customized operating systems or private distros to ASICS and daughter boards.

And in an interesting way, this goes against what customers want.

For the most part, customers love special purpose systems. The NAS filers, load balancers, storage switches and firewalls, even custom search appliances, solve a specific problem, do so with great focus, and are like novacaine on a technical problem. Have a pain? Numb it with an appliance.

There's only one part they don't love. Living with the economics.

Leaving high price tags aside, specialized products typically require specialized skills, customized management or versioning processes, and they tend to be difficult to integrate into increasingly uniform datacenter processes. (Southwest Airlines gets great economic advantage from only flying Boeing 737's - most CIO's crave a "737 datacenter," built on one OS, with shared services for all - yet most will admit to having inherited a Noah's Ark).

On the other hand, suppliers (like Sun) love general purpose systems. By design, general purpose systems, like general purpose servers or operating systems, aren't focused on one market. Instead, they focus on horizontal segments of the market (like web serving), and allow us to amortize R&D investments over a far broader opportunity. While allowing us and our customers to leverage the management, supply chains, administration, versioning and even ISV's that build up around very high volume platforms.

Potentially more work for the customer on day one, but typically massive financial and administrative savings. As an example, tomorrow morning we're introducing a new product, internally named "Thumper." It's a 4 core server with 24 terabytes of storage, housed within a very small (4 RU) box, leveraging the most advanced file system to hit the market in years, ZFS.

We're still figuring out what to call the product, "open source storage" or "a data server," but by running a general purpose OS on a general purpose server platform, packed to the gills with storage capacity, you can actually run databases, video pumps or business intelligence apps directly on the device itself, and get absolutely stunning performance. Without custom hardware (ZFS puts into software what was historically done with specialized hardware). All for around $2.50/gigabyte - with all software included.

How much new work does a customer need to do to run Thumper in their network? None. It's just a Solaris system, managed, versioned and administered like all their other Solaris systems. How much work does an ISV need to do to take advantage of Thumper? None, like I said, it's just Solaris, the same as what runs on our, HP's, Dell's and IBM's servers.

And the best part for Sun? Thumper leverages the general purpose systems innovation at our core, leverages the open source operating system used in datacenters across the world already, and allows us to amortize a tighter R&D budget over a broader market. While driving cost down for customers, and expanding the market for our ISV's, resellers and partners. Moving from specialized to generalized.

So if you'd like to know what Thumper looks like (and at 170 lbs, it is a thing of beauty, but a very heavy thing of beauty), it looks like this:

And yes, we will be including Thumper in our Try and Buy program. And I'd like to personally apologize to all those poor UPS, DHL and FedEx drivers...

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Update: video for this morning's launch event, here. Worth watching all (especially Fowler's segment). My favorite part was Tim O'Reilly talking about the impact of Web 2.0 on application architectures and datacenter requirements. He's accompanied by Scott Yara from Greenplum, one of the smartest startups I've seen in a while. Their interview is at 1:04:35 in the playback.

And btw, given the volume of comments related to "how do I replace a dead drive" in Thumper - the answer is you don't, you let Solaris and ZFS simply remove it from use (while maintaining provable data integrity), and leave it for an annual maintenance call to clean out failed drives and drop in fresh ones (known in the business as "failing in place"). If you're interested in understanding the magic behind ZFS, this is a great tutorial (delivered by one of the inventors of ZFS, the very eloquent Bill Moore).

Were it me, I guess I would've waited for some business results, but maybe I said something here that annoyed them (which is ironic, given that they cite citizen media as being the most profoundly relevant force in the market today, number 1 on their 50 that matter most).

And continuing the ironies, I had the pleasure of chatting with number 44 of the 50 that B2.0 implies does matter, Bill McDonough, a couple weeks ago - click here for his and my thoughts on sustainable development, and the impact of bridging the digital divide on familial stability.

I also had a good chat with Kevin Werbach at his Supernova conference last week. What a very smart guy, and a great conference. I'll post the content as soon as it's available. Talk about someone who clearly does matter... he'd be in my top 50.

And here's a great win against Microsoft - I'm hopeful you're going to start seeing a lot more of these...

So... here's an invitation to developers and customers that don't want to move to Solaris, want to stay on GNU/Linux, but still want to take advantage of Niagara's (or our Galaxy system's) energy efficiency - click here, we'll send you a Niagara or Galaxy system, free. Write a thorough*, public review (good or bad - we just care about the fidelity/integrity of what's written - to repeat, it can be a good review, or a poor review), we'll let you keep the system. Free.

And if you want proof that volume matters, I thought this was interesting. The world's first platinum ringtone (known as a "blingtone") - with more than a billion wireless subscribers in the world, my bet is they're going to need to define a category above platinum...

Focus on volume, value follows... and with that in mind, where are my manners: HAPPY BIRTHDAY OpenSolaris!.

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* as determined by the product team, in their sole discretion...

As you know, computers consume a ton of energy - if you don't work in a datacenter, you may not know what I'm talking about. But you know how your laptop warms your lap? Or your PC heats up your den? Multiply that a few thousand times over, and you have a problem faced by most datacenters - power draw and heat dissipation. Map that challenge to every business on earth, and you have a global power crisis as the network is built out. (And talk to some web 2.0 startups, you'll hear many say their second biggest operating expense, after salaries, is electricity - that's why the big search companies are building data centers where power's cheap).

Back to my story... the CIO in my prior posting informed her CEO that in order to support more analytics and trading activity - the computational heart of their business - they needed to build a bigger computing grid. For which they needed more space (which isn't cheap in midtown Manhattan), and more power - to which he responded, "the CEO of the power company is a friend of mine - let me just give him a call."

The CIO replied, "no no, those are only a couple of limiters. The more power we bring in, the more cooling we need. The more cooling we need, the more power again. But the thing that's really holding us back is even with more budget for space, power and cooling, we need backup power in the event of an outage, and the generator necessary to provide backup power of this magnitude is the size of a locomotive, and the only place we could possibly put that is on the roof, and look, we DON'T HAVE ANY MORE ROOM!"

And now you know why we've been so focused on the physical size and energy efficiency of our new computing and storage platforms, in addition to their raw performance. (And if you'd like a sample to try for yourself, just click here, or read what others have experienced.) The lowest end systems start at $795 (no, that's not a typo).

_______________

And Mr. Scoble - thanks for taking the time to stop in, much appreciated. I enjoyed the discussion, too. Thank you for pioneering the medium.

No, seriously.

Apparently the space savings and lower power consumption of a flat panel TV (think about it, they're quite a bit smaller and draw far less energy) allowed hotels to skip having to put giant media cabinets in their rooms. And they could save on their total power (and air conditioning) envelope, as well. Which freed up space, power and budget for more rooms. Which led to a glut of new rooms, and the rest falls into place.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with a CIO at a large financial institution in midtown Manhattan a few months back. She'd just been promoted to be the CIO of her company, and in one of her first meetings with the CEO, brought him a picture of the roof of their building.

Care to guess why?

He said, "about 70% was a complete surprise."

Ouch. That's not good.

To test, I asked, "before today, did you know that Solaris was open source, or ran on Dell, HP and IBM hardware, not just Sun's?" "Nope."

And like I said, this was a Fortune 100 opportunity.

Despite the ample advice I receive, getting through the din, especially in the world of IT, doesn't happen with a superbowl ad (can you remember a single one?), or buying every billboard in every town, or every ad word on-line. We know, we measure their effectiveness.

We know the most valued information travels by word of mouth. Through blogs, on-line reviews, or other on-line conversations. Or "kneecap to kneecap," as we sit across the table from customers in our briefing centers. And frankly, the most valuable information about Sun doesn't come from Sun, it comes from other customers.

So how do you get the word out if you don't have a $500M ad budget? To me, it's not so much about getting the word out, as letting the eyes and ears in. You can tell I'm a big fan of transparency - that's why I write a blog (with comments on, and yes, I read every one, as do a host of others at Sun). It's why I encourage others to drive the conversation in the market, as well. Transparency's at least a part of the solution. If not an outright competitive weapon.

A very wise man once said, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" - and in my view, exposing our internals to the outside world also helps us respond to problems more rapidly. True, we have to expose the occasional unhappy customer (I hear this one, in particular, recently became happy), but we expose them to people who can help, too - from within Sun, or within the community. We can't solve problems we don't know about. Like the good justice said, sunlight's a good disinfectant.

Which is why you'll see something very interesting next week start to appear on Sun's web pages and throughout our on-line store. You'll start to see product reviews written by users. You'll see user defined ratings, right on our products. Just like book or product reviews at Amazon. We're starting with just a few products, but it'll ultimately extend all the way up to our highest end enterprise offerings.

What's the risk? That we're exposing ourselves to criticism? That we may have on display the fact that one product or another isn't perfect? (That our competitors may try to rate all our products?)

Nope.

The far bigger risk is that we'd meet another customer surprised by what we had to offer. Unaware that our systems were 5 times as energy efficient as our competitors. That Solaris was free, open source, and available on Dell or HP. Or that Thumper was about to reset the economics of the storage industry.

And to my mind, sunlight's not just the best disinfectant.

It's the best informant, too.

From a voice you'll trust more than ours - your own.

By now you've all seen the press release we issued today, outlining a plan approved by Sun's board of directors - in which we'll be lowering cost, accelerating profitability, and as a part of both, implementing a workforce reduction of up to 5,000 employees. At the outset, I know these changes will be tough for many employees, but I'm also convinced they'll yield a more valuable company for customers, shareholders and our remaining employees, one that's leaner and more efficient.

We've also provided insight into Sun's operating income goals for 2007, and a framework for thinking about our performance beyond that point. We've also changed elements of our corporate governance - these actions are designed to make Sun a more transparent organization, and one more responsive to long-term shareholders, and simpler to understand.

I'd like to review the thought processes that led to these decisions, and provide color on our going forward market focus and R&D priorities.

Just after last quarter's earnings call, I initiated a top to bottom review of our markets, our R&D portfolio, and our overall corporate resourcing. You've already seen management and organizational changes resulting from that work, reported in the past few weeks.

At a top level, these reviews were focused on simplifying Sun - making choices to clarify our priorities, speed up our progress, and drive the transparency that gives all of you more insight into where we're headed. It's been similar actions, over the years, that have enabled us to expand gross margins and deliver top line growth. But these are all points along a path, a path we're now accelerating.

So first, I'll address Sun's market focus.

Our industry is littered with companies that try to be all things to all people. That's not Sun.

In my first 30 days as CEO, I've spent a great deal of time with leaders from among our global customers – and having just completed our most successful JavaOne conference ever, with our most strategic constituency, the Java and Solaris developer communities.

I've heard a consistent message - the internet's growing at an incredible rate - and for many of our customers, the network has become core to how they engage their markets and create competitive advantage. Those are our key customers, those that see network computing as a vital element of their strategy, those pushing the limits of scale and load, and those that see IT innovation as anything but a cost center.

As we began nearly two years ago, we will continue to simplify our coverage models, adding expertise where we can grow value and share. As you've seen in Gartner Dataquest's recent Worldwide Server report, Sun did just this, gaining share with both UltraSPARC systems and x64 systems against our leading competitor/partners. We absolutely believe we can continue to grow as we focus our field and partnering resources on the right opportunities.

We will focus on those companies, from startups to global players, that see network computing as their principal route to market, principal vehicle to differentiate, and principal competitive weapon. We expect to focus our coverage in these accounts, while streamlining our efforts to extend our coverage with the world's most attractive partner community. And to be clear, we are adding coverage and technical specialists, while continuing to reduce redundant or duplicative functions. The market isn't shrinking, nor will our field presence, channel focus or partnering efforts.

Next, I'd like to focus on our research and development priorities.

As many of you are aware, Sun has one of the strongest R&D organizations in the world - one we've sustained while our competitors have cut - leaving us with an operating system and microprocessor platform which makes our competitors begin to appear as partners. We have some demonstrable technology advantages... energy efficiency, operating systems innovation, dramatic gains in developer adoption. That's certainly the cornerstone of our recovery.

And with those assets, we serve two constituencies – developers, who create content for the network, and deployers, who purchase and operate software and hardware infrastructure in the world's datacenters. I will continue to stress that revenue for Sun is a lagging indicator of the adoption of our core developer platforms – both of which we are reinforcing with today's actions.

We will decrease some non-core R&D, and specifically duplicative or redundant infrastructure and management processes, but we are expecting to increase our focus on developers, and on investments in Java innovation, and the open source Solaris operating system. The adoption of those technologies will continue to define large revenue opportunities for us in companies like eBay, Motorola, General Motors and American Express – all of whom, by making decisions long ago to leverage Java and Solaris, have become very significant customers - in software, in systems, in storage and services.

As the world's largest free and open source company, we expect to monetize a portion of what we freely distribute through service and support contracts, along with traditional software licensing; and through volume as well as enterprise systems and storage sales. We expect the internet marketplace to grow, and we expect our core intellectual property, for developers and deployers, to give us a significant competitive advantage against those without comparable assets. Simplicity, scale, automation and security will continue to be our differentiators.

You will see in today's actions that we will be simplifying our product line, and reducing duplicative R&D – to help you interpret that, we will build all products at Sun from Java, Solaris, StorageTek and from our newly unified SPARC and x64 SunFire platforms. I'd like to briefly point to three products that represent the future of such systems innovations. The recently unveiled Niagara servers, the StorageTek Titanium archive platform; and lastly, an upcoming extension to our NAS offerings, code named Thumper.

Having anticipated today's datacenter focus on green computing, Sun began investing years ago in energy efficiency - as a result, our Niagara servers now operate at less than half to a fifth the power draw of our competition (potentially qualifying our customers for carbon credits). As I mentioned earlier, many of you saw the share gains Gartner reported for Sun last week – we believe we can continue to grow share, having recently taped out an even more energy efficient follow on to Niagara - we are adding support for Linux and BSD operating systems on our SPARC platforms, opening new markets for the same platform investment supporting Solaris, leveraging the same R&D over a broader opportunity.

Secondly, the StorageTek T10000 is the highest scale and security archive offering in the marketplace – it's leveraged by an array of customers, from governments to on-line portals, and many of the world's largest institutions. But you've all heard disaster stories from banks or media companies that have "lost their tapes," revealing what was supposed to be protected consumer information. As a part of Sun, we were able to leverage our systems innovation to add high security encryption to these systems, largely eliminating the risk of losing data. Integrating our StorageTek platforms with Sun's market leading Solaris and Java Enterprise offerings allows us to solve a spectrum of business problems our storage only competitors cannot. This innovation was a matter of linking existing technologies - and will be a focus area while we reduce other proprietary approaches. And again, StorageTek systems will be built atop SunFire servers running Solaris, while maintaining their mainframe heritage and interoperability. Leveraging the same R&D over a broader opportunity.

Finally, and arguably the best example of the alignment of Sun's systems innovation is a project we'll be announcing in late June - code name Thumper. Thumper is a SunFire server, running Solaris and its 128-bit ZFS file system, that packs 24 Terabytes of storage into a miniature package - allowing Solaris and Java applications to run directly on the storage device at breathtaking speed and price points. It's a perfect example of combining our software and hardware expertise, with an existing supply chain, to deliver a broader market, greater margins, and new customers - leveraging common IP, over a broader opportunity. We'll be announcing complete details at the end of June.

To repeat, we will be simplifying our product line, our supply chain, our development and management processes – while retaining a focus on open source innovation, horizontal scalability and security, and on service automation around our Network.com Grid. All while we continue to seamlessly interoperate with existing systems, from mainframes to Microsoft Windows.

As I stated above, we've improved gross margins over the past couple of years - we will seek to generate more value from our R&D going forward.

Finally, I'd like to leave you with a couple notes on Transparency and Business Focus

You will hear me and Sun's Chief Financial Officer, Mike Lehman, begin to make projections of our going forward business – we have an increasing confidence in the stability of that business, and as we continue to see growth in our core developer offerings, we have increasing line of sight into new markets and customer opportunities. We will reflect that clarity and transparency to the best of our ability.

Today's changes will result in a significant reduction in non-core or redundant R&D, field and corporate resourcing – with significant synergies arising from the acceleration of acquisition integrations into Sun. Again, we expect these changes to have little to no impact on customers, and instead to create more opportunities for business partners and suppliers to join with Sun in serving the global market.

We have believed for the 24 years of our existence in a singular vision – the network is the computer. That vision remains unchanged, and if anything, today's refinements to our market focus, our R&D portfolio, and to our overall business model, drive us even closer to fulfilling it.

_________________________________________________________________________

Safe Harbor Statement

This blog contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, regarding the future results and performance of Sun Microsystems, Inc., including statements regarding Sun's growth plan, Sun's return to profitability, future growth, areas of future investment, the competitive advantage that results from Sun's intellectual property and the monetization of such intellectual property, the attributes of and benefits to be derived from future products, continued gains in market share and synergies to be derived from acquisition integrations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and actual results could differ materially from those predicted in any such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in Sun's projections and forward-looking statements include: failure to achieve expected cost savings within the expected time frames; increased competition; failure to rapidly and successfully develop and introduce new products; Sun's reliance on single-source suppliers; risks associated with Sun's ability to purchase a sufficient amount of components to meet demand; inventory risks; risks associated with Sun's international customers and operations; delays in product development or customer acceptance and implementation of new products and technologies; Sun's dependence on significant customers and specific industries; Sun's dependence on channel partners; risks associated with Sun's tape products; and failure to successfully integrate acquired companies. Please also refer to Sun's periodic reports that are filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including Sun's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2005 and Sun's Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarters ended September 25, 2005, December 25, 2005 and March 26, 2006. Sun assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update these forward-looking statements.

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Sun Gains Share in Q1.

Innovation takes longer to deliver than a simple price cut, but if Q1 is an indicator of things to come, has more lasting value as a competitive weapon. For our customers and our shareholders. To be perfectly clear, lowering price is a tactic at Sun, not a strategy.

I was asked yesterday why we're gaining share - I said three reasons:

1. Solaris and Java are gaining momentum
No one can possibly dispute the impact free and open source software is having on the world - as the OpenSolaris and OpenJava communities continue to expand, as downloads and adoption increase, so does awareness of Sun's (and other open source community member) offerings and the total revenue opportunity. We gain share when customers deploy apps built on our platforms at a rate exceeding others. When our customers grow faster, so does our share - of licensed software, services on free software, servers and storage.

2. Galaxy, Niagara and Panther*
This one's more obvious - customers prefer our products when they're faster, draw less power and take up less space than the competition. World records help. But it's the total equation at this point - the "performance at any price" mentality is fading fast: just ask a Web 2.0(TM) startup what portion of their operating expense goes to electricity - you'll be stunned.

3. Sales and Service Execution
I was talking to a customer yesterday, one of our largest, and asked "how are we doing for you?" I presupposed the answer would surround our product roadmap, given how much time we'd spent getting them up to speed on where we're headed. The response had nothing to do with our products - their CIO just said, "your team is doing great for us, we love doing business with them."

When it gets right down to it, especially for our largest customers, people buy from people.

So congratulations, folks - well done, across the board.

______________

* those are code names for internal server projects, and I just earned myself some hate mail from the product groups that want me to stop using project names...

I started the week previewing the week's announcements at the NetBeans tools community gathering. Here's a little known secret: I used to run developer tools for Sun - and as I said then, and I'll say now, you need only two documents to understand a technology company's corporate strategy: their end-user tools roadmap, and their sales force comp plan. Given that the former is public knowledge, inquiring minds can wonder about the latter.

This is my JavaOne keynote - which was a ton of fun. We broke a bunch of attendance records, with something near 15,000 attendees in the room (my favorite comment came from a reporter I spoke to after the event, who said: "I was amazed at the number of languages being spoken in the audience!"). Great buzz, tons of new stuff (capped off with a real-time Java roadrace after Scott's keynote). Another reporter said, "it's like a social movement." Well, yes.

I got a chance to talk with Ed Zander, CEO of Motorola (go buy a RED phone!); and two of the world's most vocal advocates of free and open source software, Mark Shuttleworth (the guy behind Ubuntu/Debian GNU/Linux who flew up from DebConf just for this event), and Marc Fleury (CEO, JBoss, Inc. - the company bringing Red Hat into the Java community). Definitely watch the video - you'll see the symbolic passing of the pickle to Rich Green, Sun's newly minted (but refreshingly familiar) Executive Vice President, Software.

After JavaOne, I spoke with Darrell Plummer and Paul McGuckin from Gartner at their conference (video here). David Berlind, as usual, had a thoughtful analysis of the hour. Frankly, I was a little disappointed in their questioning, as well - it seemed like so many of their questions had been hashed out in blogs and user generated analysis.

But all in all, a really great week - we're now making serious progress on open sourcing Java (and despite the cynics, using a GPL license is very much *on* the table), while focusing the debate on what matters most: not access to lines of code (that's already widely available), but ensuring compatibility. Compatibility is what brought a record number of people to JavaOne this year (making it the world's largest free software conference), it's what's behind nearly 3 billion+ Java enabled devices. And for those that missed the subtlety, that compatibility is what creates the market Sun, and others, can monetize with network innovations, from software to hardware and services.

Seems like an obvious connection to me...

[update: fixed broken link]

To that end, today we announced a series of changes designed to prepare us for the next wave of system challenges and market opportunities. I want to thank Mark Canepa for years of extraordinary commitment and devotion to Sun, and welcome John Fowler (who will lead Sun's Systems businesses) and David Yen (who will lead Sun's Storage businesses) to their new roles.

Speaking of changes, tomorrow morning, I get to deliver my favorite speech of the year, my keynote at Java One. I get to do so wearing my fancy new title, "Chief Java Evangelist," a title I now share with our Chairman.

I'm still amazed when I hear folks wondering how Sun monetizes Java. So at the risk of repetition, I'd like to share a few thoughts.

When Thomas Edison first introduced the lightbulb, he held patents he tried to wield against potential competitors - he wanted to own the client (the bulb) and the server (the dynamo). He failed. Standards emerged around voltage and plugs, and GE Energy (formerly, Edison General Electric), to this day, remains one of the most profitable and interesting businesses around. How big would the power business be today if you could only buy bulbs and appliances from one company? A far sight smaller, I'd imagine. Standards grew markets and value.

Then there was the civil war era in the US, when locomotive companies all had their own railroad widths and shapes - designed only to work with their rail cars and steam engines. How'd they fare? They failed, standards emerged that unified railways and rail lines, and that era created massive wealth, connecting economies within economies. Standards grew markets and value.

To get to the impact on a global scale, you should really read Mark Levinson's The Box. Which talks to the extraordinary impact the standard shipping container had on global commerce. No, I'm not joking. It democratized global commerce. And it ain't even done.

So if you want to know how I feel about Java, my view is it's changing the world - standardizing the plugs and rail gauges and containers used by global internet players. Its momentum, in my view, is unstoppable. What's that worth to Sun? Give it your best shot. When I do, I say most of our revenue is derived from Java. Just like most of Verizon's revenue comes from handsets. Even though the economics of the handset look baffling (but I dare you to recommend to Verizon that they stop selling them). Those that believe free software or service yields lower revenue don't understand the economics or dynamics of the software industry. Think Google or Yahoo!, not Maytag.

So for those in attendance tomorrow, thank you for joining us - at what's become the world's largest free and open source software developer conference. Believe me, there's a huge tent waiting for you - I just walked the main hall, and you could fit a few Space Shuttles in the place.

And somewhat off topic, a family member of mine once asked if I ever got nervous before keynotes - when I mentioned having nearly 20,000 folks in the audience this year, they nearly passed out. My response was simple - what's it like talking to your family about their accomplishments, no matter how big a family gathering? It's easy, it's what comes naturally, it's called being a member of a community, and feeling pride. Talking about what you know and love is like falling off a log (vs. rehearsing a keynote you don't care about, my worst nightmare - second only to extreme turbulence).

So I'll see you tomorrow morning, on-line, or in person. Like I said, it's my favorite part of the year, like spending time with family (and just wait until you see who joins the family tomorrow...).

Now as you may have heard, I gave Greg a new title recently. In addition to being Sun's CTO, he's now Executive Vice President of Research and Development. Why's that important?

Well, Sun is a company built for engineers, by engineers. I know that probably rubs some folks the wrong way, who want to hear me say we're a "transformative value solutions" company (I can't keep a straight face saying it). But let's face it: value in information technology is coming down to how efficiently you can get something done. Whether it's building a 30 teraflop grid or a web services infrastructure; powering a Java handset or an entire datacenter. From what and who I see, the folks who measure that efficiency are getting more technical, not less.

When the tools are chosen or the RFP's are written, when the benchmarks are done or the operators take over, technologists are playing a more prominent role in our industry, not less. At least for our key customers, who live and die by technology (vs. those that should be shutting down their datacenters to buy network services from our core customers). Nick is right, IT Doesn't Matter to those for whom IT isn't a differentiator - but those aren't Sun's customers. Our customers live and die by IT.

So as a part of this change, the product group CTO's, the sentinels supporting the line executives who run our businesses, will also report to Greg. In the world of human resources, that's known as a "dual hard line" reporting structure. On the one hand, that's only a symbolic change.

On the other, it is a very clear indication of where we're heading. You cannot build a house by motivating sub-contractors with compelling visions of the future. That's why you hire an architect. Similarly, you can't build a network computing company without a chief architect to coordinate nearly $2 billion in R&D. And as a systems company, we now have a chief systems architect (and a fellow blogger).

This is also a signal inside and outside Sun: I am redoubling Sun's commitment to the primacy of the systems technologist, the systems innovator and the systems engineer. And not just in engineering - but across Sun as a system itself (more on that in a later blog). Our core customers, those who develop systems and services, who operate, administer - and pay for - them, need thought partners and system (not component) suppliers. Most business problems, in our world, have solutions rooted in innovation - and primarily technical innovation. That's our history, and our future.

I'm thrilled to have Greg assist me in driving focus and simplicity throughout Sun. From our great new developer tools, all the way up to identity enabled encrypted tape.

There are an ever smaller number of true systems innovators - those that can bring together the software, the hardware, the network and services layers, to form a coherent and compelling platform for the future of network computing. In your datacenter or in your pocket. We're committed to be exactly that: an innovator that delivers value as measured by those who live or die by innovation.

Please join me in congratulating Greg as he helps to define a new era of technical leadership at Sun.

___________

ps. For those interested, here's a Q&A I just did with Forbes. And yet more focus on the things that really matter (at least the Inquirer has a sense of humor).

I want to start by thanking Sun's global volunteers - who every day work to improve the communities in which Sun operates around the world. I had the option of cancelling my volunteer commitments given this week's events, but decided to keep it - and had the privilege to visit Blacow elementary school, and talk to a group of 1st grade students and their teacher about the internet. They showed me their StarOffice skills (no, I'm not joking), and when I asked how many of them had email accounts, about a quarter of the room raised their hand. These are first graders, mind you. (I asked one student who sent her email, and she said her Mom, but only when she travelled.)

So I'd like to thank the folks that organized my visit, Mrs. Lorenz for putting up with my questions about how many of her friends knew that OpenOffice was free (on Windows, too!) for all schools throughout the world, and the terrific first grade class for their outstanding presentations.

Earlier in the week, I hosted my first Leadership Conference as CEO. Sun's Leadership Conferences bring together our global leaders twice a year to exchange ideas, discuss priorities, and share best practices. This year was a little unusual - Scott and I communicated his stepping up to Chairman, and my stepping up to CEO. We did so in front of a global town hall on the first day - we had nearly 20,000 (!) employees on-line to watch the event. You've already seen the speech I gave - it's my last blog entry.

Emotionally, it was one of the toughest speeches I've ever given - and I want to thank those of you that added comments, and supported Scott on your own blogs, and throughout the media.

After my speech and a fairly thorough question and answer session, Scott left the auditorium - handing the keys to me, and saying, "I'm going to spend the next 90 days opening every door on the planet. Call me if you need me." And then it was my Leadership Conference. It happened that fast.

The theme of this year's event was simple: Growing. Through Pace and Transparency - it's not just our products that are speeding up this year. We're going to be driving unparalleled transparency into everything we do, precisely because it's the most efficient mechanism to accelerate change throughout Sun. Transparency enables everything to go faster, invites accountability (to which most folks in large organizations aspire), and drives dialogue between Sun and the communities we serve.

So to answer the obvious, for those that have asked the question, "as CEO, will you continue blogging?"

Absolutely yes - count on it. (We'll now be the only Fortune 500 company with a CEO that blogs - the first of many firsts to come.) It's just one of many ways we're going to turn Sun inside out - on our path to growing value (not just revenue or earnings).

And if you want to know who committed to redefining Sun Microsystems, it's these folks, the global leadership team at Sun.

I'm the guy in the center wearing the tie - and before you ask, no, the dress code isn't changing (and if you were going to be in a photo your mother would see (not this one, she doesn't read my blog), you'd wear a tie, too).

In upcoming blogs, I'll cover Greg Papadopoulos's new role at Sun; and my priorities in the next 30 days.

I remember he talked about network computing in a very strange way - he just assumed the future, he'd already moved his entire mindset, and his lifestyle, to the network. He looked at the world through the network. And remember, the network didn't really exist back then. It was a twinkle in a terminal window.

We were talking about the state of the industry - he viewed it in terms of a world that hadn't been built. I viewed it (remember I was at a startup) in terms of what business I could close next quarter. I had payroll to make. And I can honestly say I'd never met anyone so plainspoken about the future. Or so facile with soundbites to describe it. He was confident in a cheshire cat kind of way, not arrogant or professorial. He was in on a secret: the network is the computer.

You may not remember what it was like in 1992, but Wall Street had Sun in its sights - Scott was getting all kinds of flak for not following the rest of the industry. He'd refused to endorse one particular technology, known then as the Chicago Project. A few of the pundits said, "The Chicago Project is the future, and Sun's fighting it." Scott didn't think so. They said he was religious.

But he wasn't making a bet. He was fulfilling a vision. A vision that was obvious to him, and a vision in which the Chicago Project would play a bit part - we had bigger things to focus on.

If you don't remember the Chicago Project it was the code name to Microsoft's Windows 95. The companies that adopted it - and replaced their own innovation - well, you can't name them any more. They lost their ability to participate in the future, to differentiate.

What happened to Sun? Scott, and leaders across Sun, changed the world - by making an unpopular, but wildly successful bet on the internet as a driver of demand for systems innovation. The network is the computer.

A few years after that meeting, Netscape licensed the Java platform, my company was acquired by Sun, and I began working for Scott's then CTO, Dr. Eric Schmidt. I saw the vision, the concept behind "the network is the computer," wasn't just Scott's - everyone that worked at Sun thought his vision was obvious. And back in 1996, it was becoming more true, but not the certainty it is today - the world back then was fundamentally changing. Capital was shifting. Huge numbers of companies were being started and staffed, all over the world. Businesses were being transformed, started from nothing and becoming global titans. Enormous wealth was being created - durable wealth, not the donut franchises or sock puppets folks love to hate. Companies like eBay, AOL, Amazon, Yahoo! and Google.

And it has been, since that time, a wild ride for me, and for all of us at Sun. We've seen a massive global buildout, that took a pause in 2001 - remember, bubbles always precede buildouts. And Scott, back in 2001, when our revenue - given how focused we were on startups, on financial services and on telco customers - was on its way from 18 billion down to around 11... Scott was far more focused on what was going to happen in 2006 than worried about that quarter. He had that same confidence in the future I first saw in 1992. Bet on innovation and innovators. Stick to your vision and your visionaries.

Which is why he preserved R&D, and jobs, when the world told him otherwise. Why we preserved our relationships with the developer community. Why we redoubled our investment in systems innovation. Why we increased our attention on key customers and partners. Even broadened it to include some unfamiliar faces.

And nearly two years ago, Scott forwarded me something a journalist had written about Sun, and about Scott personally. It wasn't the most positive note, and it was criticizing us for the bets we'd made, and for a vision that at that point, didn't square with the reality in front of us - the new Chicago Project of the day looked more attractive.

And I sent a note back to Scott. Every once in a while you end up as the morale officer for your boss, and it was one of the rare days at Sun where I was more enthusiastic than Scott.

And what I told him then - is what I'll tell you now.

There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than you. And unlike Henry Ford and some of the industrialists that preceded you, not all of those folks just work for Sun - I'm not talking hundreds or thousands of jobs, I'm talking millions. They ended up in America and India, Indonesia and Antarctica, Madagascar, Mexico, Brazil and Finland. They ended up everywhere. Everywhere the network travels.

No single individual has spawned so many startups, fueled so much venture investment, or raised so much capital without actually trying - just with a vision of the future that gets more obvious by the day.

No single individual has so effectively created and promoted the technologies at the heart of a new world emerging around us. A world in which the demand for network computing technology will never decline - as we share more family photos, watch more digital movies, do more banking on-line, build more communities on line, run our supply chains, automate our governments or educate our kids.

And no single individual, outside my family, has been a greater influence on my life - I am quite confident the same is true for millions of network consumers across the world. It's probably less obvious to them as it is to me. You have defined for me what tenacity means. What integrity, courage and commitment mean. Inside of work, and outside.

Which is why I'm thrilled you're sticking around for the next twenty years. To lend that confidence to the decisions I make, to help spot the next Chicago Project, and to send me the email boosts I've needed in the past, and I know I'll need in the future. It's not your fingerprints that will be all over our return to prominence, it'll be your footprints right underneath it.

As I said before, we are in a rare industry - in which demand for what we build, for the technologies that power the network, will never cease. Not even the oil industry can count on that. We have the same vision today as we did back in 1992 - a vision that only gets more true as each day passes, and only gets easier to describe to your parents, and to an ever younger population that seems to know that vision in their hearts.

The network is the computer.

Thank you, Scott, you are a hero to us all.

I'm not one to name drop, but this is one of those extraordinary interactions I had to put in a first sentence - I'll return to why I met with him in a moment, but I was having a hard time with a graceful segue later in this post. So with that done...

I've given keynotes at Java One for many years, and one of the things I've grown to expect is what I'll call the "Brazilian effect."

Having just returned from a trip to Sao Paulo and Brasilia, I can confirm Brazil's one of the more progressive nations in the world when it comes to the use of free and open source software. It's got one of the largest, and most vibrant developer communities (great to see the OpenSolaris community putting down roots!),

and as a result, there's never a shortage of interesting projects for me or James to reference during our talks.

But whenever you mention Brazil or a Brazilian project, you have to watch out for the Brazilian effect, the total disruption of your speech by a contingent of flag waving (and wearing) Brazilians that, upon hearing their nation mentioned, break into hoots and hollers and whistles and applause. It takes a few minutes to die down, and the enthusiasm's contagious. And it drives a bit of competitiveness from folks all around the world who want to know why the Brazilians get to have all the fun. (Let's see more flags this year!)

Brazil's very focused on making Brazil a better place - and an open network is playing a big role. There are nearly as many mobile handsets in the market as there are credit card holders (the former are well on their way to being default micro-payment, as well as application platforms), and the number of Brazilians with broadband access is skyrocketing. There's a move to drive all of Brazil on-line, as a means of connecting Brazil to Brazil, and to the global market - and free and open source software is playing an instrumental role.

So I'd now like to say, "I understand the Brazilian effect." There is a distinct sense that Brazilians want a better Brazil, that there's a pride in its progress and evolution. There's a palpable energy, even and maybe especially within the halls of its government institutions (where it's sometimes harder to find energy in other nations). I had an opportunity to travel to the seat of power in Brazil, to Brasilia, a city with an interesting history.

And once there, I met with the Congressional President, and with President Lula himself. We talked about free and open source software, the future of the network, and how Sun could help bring more Brazilians on-line, while transferring the skills and technologies that create jobs and export opportunities. And not because Sun's a charity, but because it's good for our business, too - more Brazilians on-line drives more business for Sun, as a connected citizenry participates, with media companies, government agencies, financial institutions and one another. But Brazil knows it can't afford a connected society without the competition and opportunities brought about by free and open source software.

The Brazilian government is aggressively focused on digital inclusion, on bringing every segment of society to the 'net. They're making some of the world's largest investments in free software, leveraging it to deploy next generation network platforms spanning traditional telecommunication infrastructure to digital television. (One of the lead government IT folks was walking me through the lobby of their Congress, showing me their voting systems, and proudly said, "we're only running open source software now. We run Solaris.") The IPTV projects are really interesting - in scale alone (there are more TV's in Brazil than mobile phones, and go take a look at the size of the country if you're interested in network topology problems).

But the rollout of digital TV, and the internet itself, is threatened in Brazil by licensing authorities and patent holders, who are holding Brazil, and every other developing nation, hostage to royalty claims and licensing fees. Claiming that open source software isn't safe (it is, we indemnify our open source customers just like we did when our software was closed source), or that the foundation technologies will obligate Brazil to pay extraordinary royalties for each citizen or citizen access (not true, either).

Those threats are simple - patent holders (who have names very familiar in the IT world) and licensing authorities (sponsored by the same companies) are impeding the rollout of the network to developing nations. We were there to present an alternative, as we're doing across the world. Presenting those alternatives to drive progress, transparency, and ultimately demand for what we build.

Because bridging the digital divide is what gets us out of our seats, hooting and hollering. The network effect, after all, is Sun's Brazilian effect. And stay tuned on our progress - we're hoping to have some interesting things to announce shortly.

And once again, during a town hall in Sao Paulo, I was asked, "what are you going to write in your blog about your visit to Brazil?" My response, "I'm going to write about how great our team is." A great team, doing important work, not just important for our customers, but witness the meeting with President Lula, important for Brazil.

Congrats, Cleber and team - keep it up!

(with apologies for the folks who got cut off on the edges - next time, I'll be sure we've got a far wider lens...)

A few years ago, I was sitting across from a Wall Street CIO, one of many I was visiting in New York. I was asking them all the same question, "do you feel the grid you're building is delivering a competitive advantage to your business?" (For those that don't know what a grid is, it's a collection of low cost network, storage, computing and software elements, lashed together to do work that historically required very expensive dedicated proprietary technologies). I asked the same question of CIO's in the energy industry, using grids to find oil. In the life sciences industry, using grids to discover drugs or model proteins. In the movie industry, using grids to render movies.

The answers I received, typically delivered by an impassioned CTO that had spent a year building a grid, was always the same: "absolutely yes. Our grid is way better than any of our competitors'."

I haven't stopped asking that question. But about a year ago, after Sun outlined plans to build a public, multi-tenant grid (just like the power companies run), and make it available for $1/cpu-hr, and after a few industry notables began suggesting change was afoot, I started hearing a different tune. "Um... maybe my grid's no different than anyone else's."

Now, since John Gage first uttered the phrase, Sun has been saying "The Network is the Computer." It's one of those rare vision statements that only becomes more true over time. And next week, we're going to prove the point by unveiling the world's first on demand supercomputer. And by on demand, I mean accessible through your browser, with a credit card. This isn't yesterday's definition of On Demand, involving custom financing contracts, prepositioned inventory and a sales rep in a crisp blue suit ready to negotiate. Nope, our definition is just like eBay's: you bring a browser and a credit card, we offer the service. No fuss, no muss. We believe the simplicity, accessibility and affordability of this service changes the face of computing for all organizations, large and small, public or private.

The Sun Grid (which will be officially unveiled in a few days) is an offering we and our partners will be expanding over the months and years to come - like any good product, there's no end to the innovation possible. This represents not only the future of product development at Sun, but like the Java platform and the internet itself, it really represents the future of computing.

As strange as it may sound, consumers are way ahead of most enterprises when it comes to using grids (and paying for them). Most of us live on the grid at home - we use Google and Yahoo!, we love eBay, we upload and share photos and movies, and gather our news from various sources on the web. Most of us bank from home, we leverage network email services - and if you think about it, that transformation all occurred within the last decade. In the blink of an eye.

But behind the corporate firewall, the transformation toward multi-tenant grids has been slower. Frankly, it's been tough to convince the largest enterprises that a public grid represents an attractive future. Just as I'm sure George Westinghouse was confounded by the Chief Electricity Officers of the time that resisted buying power from a grid, rather than building their own internal utilities. But that's not to suggest it hasn't been happening in the business world.

Witness the meteoric rise of Salesforce.com - or RightNow, or PayPal - or any of a number of other services designed to replace traditional infrastructure behind the corporate firewall. Smaller businesses especially have flocked to the grid to spare themselves the headaches of architecting and owning their own datacenters.

But larger enterprises have been tougher to convince. As an example, for the past 15 months, we've been negotiating with one financial institution interested in leveraging our grid for spike loads of portfolio simulations. When their procurement team held up the contract to start negotiating the gauge of chain link we'd use around the grid, and which vendors were approved to supply network cables, we gingerly passed them back to our traditional sales channels - this was clearly a customer that would prefer to build their own infrastructure (can you imagine arguing with PayPal over chain link?). So be it, that's where most IT is purchased today, and will likely be purchased for decades to come.

But there's no denying there's a change occurring.

A good friend of mine, a bioinformatician (love that title), once described how frustrated he was at having to wait for his university's supercomputing facility. "If you had a grid available on line, I'd bring my whole budget to you." Granted his budget was something like $10,000 a quarter, but rumor has it there's a good business in the long tail. My view - most computing will be purchased by that tail. There are, after all, far more small financial institutions than large. The same applies to movie studios, pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, and nearly every other industry on earth. I'm very comfortable betting on the value in volume - and the willingness of those smaller firms to change culture, process and lifestyle to get a competitive advantage through network services. Just think back ten years - when most enterprises I met laughed at the idea of putting business systems on the internet. Now you're an anomaly if you're "off the grid."

But getting to this week hasn't been without hiccups. After we announced it, we started working with a number of companies interested in negotiating the equivalent of chain link fencing, as above - we saw IBM Global Services (and HP's equivalent) in every one of the deals. We learned a lot, but mainly that most enterprises today define On Demand computing as hosting - they want to give their computers, software, networking and storage to a third party, and rent them back for a fixed price. But that'd be like an electricity company collecting generators and unique power requirements, and trying to build a grid out of them. That's not a business we're in (nor one in which technology plays much of a role - it's all about managing real estate and call centers, as far as we can tell). Grids are all about standardization and transparency - and building economies of scale.

Building a secure, publicly available multi-tenant grid also turned out to be exceptionally complex - there's a reason no one had ever done it before. Most grids are application specific - for search, or auctions or payment. A general purpose computing grid was ploughing new ground - and we wanted to ensure availability and security would be as high as possible. To stress the grid, I actually sent mail to all of Sun's employees challenging them (with the promise of a new workstation) to see if they could bring it down. On the theory I'd rather have a Sun employee, especially a Sun engineer with deep insight into our products, show us how to break it, than a rogue user.

After disappointing a huge swath of our employees who couldn't participate in the contest (our export control policies constrain which elements of our global workforce can be exposed to the grid), we surfaced several vulnerabilities in the very high-scale interaction of hardware, networking and software platforms (again, given that no one's ever done this before, it wasn't all that surprising). We also engaged with the folks who monitor technology export control for the US Government (if there's a harder civil service job in the government, I'd like to know it) - who helped us ensure the grid wouldn't be accessible to people with nefarious intent. They understood we wanted to make this as simple as applying for an eBay account - we'll be close, but we've got to have a higher level of scrutiny (which is why, when you apply for an account, it'll take a few hours, and won't be instantaenous - but that's our goal).

Those are just a few of the hurdles we faced, but now we're ready - ready to release the first, publicly accessible instantiation of the future of computing. And here are a few things to be aware of:

First, in this first release, the Sun Grid will be available only to customers inside the US. Why? Export constraints. Stay tuned for international availability. And yes, we will be doing this globally.

Second, don't expect instant account provisioning. We're shooting for a few hours, depending upon demand, and no worse than 24 hours. But please be patient. We are focused on ease of provisioning, but we're also conscious of the risk and security requirements.

Third, we're opening on day 1 with less than 5,000 cpu sockets (both Opteron and UltraSPARC) - the world's most power efficient servers. As demand emerges, we'll be adding to that capacity - without limitation.

And finally, stay tuned for the web service API's. What you'll see this week is relatively simple, and a version 1.0 foundation for what's in store. Where are we headed? To release computing as a service, to be mashed up with other services (I can hear VC's around the world offering a standing ovation - 'no more having to build one datacenter per startup!')

If you're read this far, here's a final bit of color on the incredibly fortuitous domain name for the future of computing: Network.com.

As it turns out, midway through Sun's due dilligence in the acquisition of StorageTek, we learned they were the owners of Network.com. They hadn't really ever used it - a hidden gem. In hindsight, it may end up being one of the most valuable domain names in the history of computing. And we're certainly going to do what we can to burnish that value...

So have at it! Go to network.com later this week, grab a PayPal account, and experience for yourself what it's like to use one of the world's largest supercomputers. Without having to house it, manage it, power it, administer it, provision it... or buy it.

The Network is the Computer.

Once again, more true by the day.

That's exactly what happened in New Orleans a few months back. Which led many folks to see the convergence of telecommunications, technology and media in a very personal, and dissatisfying way - while demonstrating the vanishing distinction between web services, social services and emergency services. The network is all about moving data around, whether purchase orders, tax forms or storm paths.

Last weekend, I had a similar personal experience. I was on my way to show my kids what snow looked like, taking them to Lake Tahoe, in the Sierra mountains. If you know Northern California, you know that means crossing Donner Pass. A place that makes me think of that great Andy Grove quote, "only the paranoid survive." During winter storms, you don't drive through that area lightly - there are even police at checkpoints to make sure you're well equipped - with chains for your tires, or a four wheel drive vehicle. City-folks like me even pack water, food and blankets. Just in case.

Before leaving, I checked the weather. A winter storm was approaching, and knowing the State of California places web cameras in key locations to help monitor traffic, I went off to a search engine, and typed "California highway video" to get a real time view of road conditions.

And what did I see?

A California State Agency web site that required Windows Media 9. I happened to be running my Solaris laptop at the time. So I couldn't receive the video. As a tax paying citizen of the state, my government was inadvertently telling me I could not receive state emergency services without buying a Microsoft product. Governor Schwarzenegger, I don't want my or my employer's tax dollars going to promote a monopoly in California. (Love them though I do as a business partner.)

So now you know why the Open Document Format Alliance is important - in a democratic society, agencies, corporations or individuals that serve the public's interest should be free to do so without burdening their constituents with an obligation to purchase one company's product. That's what the ODF Alliance will help achieve - by creating and making freely available to anyone that wants it, a standard for representing document based information.

It seems plainly wrong for a government to suggest that citizens purchase Microsoft Word before reading a storm warning or ballot initiative. Or that they abandon their Macintosh to run Internet Explorer before applying for disaster relief. Or that they buy a Windows Mobile phone before requesting 911. Or that they have Solaris installed to pay their taxes.

And rather than sit by and complain, several of us - competitors and partners alike, along with a broad cross section of global industry and library associations - are all banded together to promote a standard for the free interchange of document based information. A standard that doesn't require any one company's technology, or a royalty check or fear of patent litigation. A standard that leverages a common interest in having a free, open and neutral standard to which any company, individual or government can subscribe.

A standard that serves the public's interest.

And to put our money where our mouths are, the first application to fully support ODF is the world's most popular free/open source office productivity suite, OpenOffice - which we encourage governments to distribute to their citizens. There's no better way to serve the public's interest than to give them freedom.

And choice.

I'm not necessarily the biggest fan of open letters - but every once in a while, they help explain our position, or motivate customers to engage in driving the industry. And customer involvement has led to some remarkable innovation (my favorite example being here).

With full disclosure, we've been trying for a while to engage HP in a dialog around converging our Unix efforts - their Unix, called HP-UX, was the second most popular Unix behind our offering, Solaris. But HP's customers are increasingly moving away from HP-UX - not because they don't love it (many do, and there are a lot of folks that have a deep respect for it at Sun, as well) - but because HP has limited where customers can use it. As the exclusive OS for HP's Precision Architecture, HP has built up an installed base of more than $100 billion - for a reason. It was a great platform.

But then HP decided to end of life PA-RISC - and in so doing, left their user community with a very tough choice: if you want to preserve your investment in HP-UX, you have to rearchitect your entire datacenter to adopt Intel's troubled Itanium project. But if you want to enjoy HP's high volume Proliant line of x86/x64 computers, you can't run HP-UX - unlike Sun, HP elected not to invest in supporting their Unix, HP-UX, on their own x86/x64 servers.

So we'd like to offer HP, and the HP user community, a third option: to converge Solaris 10 with HP-UX, running on HP's very own Proliant product line. We've spoken to HP about it, thought we saw a glimmer of interest, and now we want to get their customers and partners involved.

To build up to this point, we've been doing our best to faithfully support Solaris 10 on HP's entire Proliant family of servers. They're all qualified - try the download, here.

And we're going to continue extending the olive branch to the HP-UX user community, with tools, technologies and partner support. But we'd like HP to contribute to the effort, on behalf of and in concert with their customers and developers.

So now it's up to you - the HP user and developer community. Talk to your HP sales rep or management contact if you're interested in seeing such a project flourish. You have all the power in this dialog. And Sun would be very supportive - I commit that. You shouldn't have to abandon HP-UX, and we'll gladly work to ensure it.

At bottom, a converged Solaris/HP-UX roadmap would offer our joint customers choice, innovation, and a broad spectrum of qualified hardware - while preserving your investment in skills, your confidence in the underlying intellectual property and technology... and most importantly, given that Solaris is open source, your choices going forward. That's all upside, as far as we're concerned.

Now we just need to get HP on board...

The terms and conditions are now updated to reflect the fact that Sun pays the postage if you return the system we sent you. There's always been a free packing slip in the box when you received it - our legal agreement was just out of sync (and no, I don't think the agreement is poetically simple, either - that's next week's challenge). If after 60 days you don't like the system we sent, just call the 1-800 number, and someone will come out to pick it up.

We're obviously good at the free software thing. Looks like free systems/hardware might be a bit tougher - but we're going to get it right, and we promise to fulfill every request. Give us credit for running the experiment transparently - warts and all.

And to answer a few of the comment questions - the offer applies to anyone interested - not just corporate customers. We don't care if you're an educator or a park ranger or a blogger or a physicist or a CIO - so long as you're in the market for the fastest/most efficient server on earth.

And just to reiterate - once you receive the system, run your own benchmarks - post them publicly (positive or negative - points earned for thorough and complete), and our marketing team will decide who gets to keep their Niagara systems for free. Free.

ps. to the folks at slashdot, send me your contact data, we're happy to send a Niagara system for you to take a look at. Something tells me you fit the target demographic perfectly... (no floating point, heavy threading, etc.)

pps. just in case you lost track of the promo, it's here.

Change is coming to the pdf (which I agree, isn't an ideal format for the T's and C's, Elliotte - bear with us...)

My apologies for the confusion (and thanks for the attentiveness).

A while back, I announced we'd start making servers available for free trial - the objective wasn't to terrify financial analysts, although I'm certain a few gripped their chest, but instead to drive awareness among customers that hadn't been exposed to Sun. And free seemed like the right price to drive adoption among developers (honestly, we're not too worried about folks who elect not to buy failing to return a $5,000 server (we cover postage both ways)).

The program started off slowly - partly due to internal disbelief (there's a long story, there), but secondarily, our focus group feedback suggested no one believed we'd actually send them a free Niagara. So let me reiterate: go to sun.com, fill out the form, we'll send you the fastest server on earth, absolutely free. If you don't like it, we'll send someone to pick it up.

We were also serious about the following: if you write a blog that fairly assesses the machine's performance (positively or negatively), send us a pointer, we're likely to let you keep the machine. (And before you ask, the marketing team makes the decision about what qualifies for the promotion, not I - although I know they love drama, charts, and compelling competitive analyses.)

The first reaction most folks have to the performance is, frankly, disbelief. A while back I got into a spat with the technologists that built the machine about whether we could fairly call them 9.6Ghz machines (as a measure of clock frequency of the chip). Paul Murphy has an interesting analysis of whether that's a fair descriptor (I say interesting because he says we're underhyping the performance - a first for the industry!).

Here's a sample benchmark, (and discussion, too). If you look at the SPEC benchmarks (the column titled "Result"), it's also validated by a neutral body. I'm thinking we should rename Sun to AAA_Sun so our name appears first in the SPEC list.

I had the privilege of making a cameo appearance today at David Berlind's MashUp Unconference - a fascinating experiment to invite a bunch of people interested in a given topic to a conference, charge them nothing, let them create the agenda on the fly at the conference, and have folks like Sun (and other companies) pick up the tab - an inversion of the traditional conference business model. I got to give a Niagara (without obligation to return) to what was voted the most popular Mashup - podbop.org. Taylor McKnight, the individual who received the machine, looked quite pleased - but asked a legitimate question: "how do I get this on the plane?"

Given that the machine is classified as a munition by the US Government, it was a perfectly legitimate question. It probably wouldn't make it past airport security (or into an overhead cabin). So yes, we're covering postage.

Taylor, I'm hoping you'll write a blog about your experience with the system (once it arrives :)... you are, after all, the target demographic.

There were quite a few startups in the audience - and given that we're beginning to turn our focus to recruiting those startups back to Sun, I thought I'd live up to my (now delinquent) commitment to publish an email I received from Marc Andreesen about his startup's experience with "Linux on Intel" vs. Solaris. Here you go:

-------- Original Message --------

Subject: followup
Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2006 15:51:28 -0800
From: Marc Andreessen < >
Organization: Ning Inc.
To: Jonathan Schwartz < >, Anil Gadre < >

Hi guys -- below is the writeup of the data I spoke about on stage yesterday.

We (Ning) are fine with you all using this however you want.

Marc

Ning Server Platform Analysis

The following data is based on an analysis we did in support of the implementation of our production environment. Ning had deployed a beta system based on a commercial Linux distribution running on whitebox (aka local system integrator PC clone) AMD Opteron servers. This infrastructure is hosted in our own cage at a commercial co-location facility. We pay a monthly fee based on the total sqft of the cage as well as the total power delivered to the cage (measured in amps).

The space and power costs are blended averages for our area (San Jose, CA):

Monthly space cost: $27.00 per sqft
Monthly power cost: $17.00 per amp

A 4-post rack (or cabinet) occupies approximately 20sqft. Each rack/cabinet has approximately 40 rack units (RU; 1RU = 1.75") of useable space. Thus:

Monthly cost per rack: 20 sqft * $27/sqft = $540
Monthly cost per RU: $540/40 = $13.50

For purposes of our analysis, let's assume all servers are of equal cost:

Server price: $3,000.00

Next we need to consider the operating system for the server, so we need to include the purchase price plus any maintenance fees. We compared a commercial Linux distribution (enterprise class) vs Solaris:

Commercial Linux annual subscription fee: $900.00
Commercial Linux per-incident charge: $380.00
Total: $1,280.00

Sun Solaris subscription fee: $120.00
Sun Solaris per-incident fee: $0.00
Total: $120.00

Given that we are in a hosted environment which imposes certain constraints (total space and power available), the acquisition cost is only a part of the equation. As Paul Harvey would say "this is the rest of the story".

Our co-location provider imposes a per-rack limit as to how much power they will provide. In our case this is 60A. The rule of thumb is to only load a circuit to 80% of the total capacity. Thus:

60A * 80% = 48A useable per rack

Now we need to determine how many systems we can fit in a rack. We know we have 40RU available and 48A of power available per rack. But how much power do the systems require? Let's see:

Sun x2100 (model 175; dual-core Opteron): 1A
Whitebox AMD (2x AMD Opteron 248): 2A
Intel dual Xeon: >3A

To determine the maximum number of systems we can deploy per rack:

Intel: 48A per rack / 3A per system = 16 systems per rack
Whitebox AMD: 48A per rack / 2A per system = 24 systems per rack
Sun x2100: 48A per rack / 1A per system = 48 systems per rack.

Given there are only 40 RU in a rack, the real limit for the Sun systems is 40 systems per rack. Next we need to determine the monthly cost of operating the systems:

60A per rack * $17 per A per month = $1,020.00 per month
Monthly rack cost: $540.00

Intel (@ 16 systems per rack):
power: $1,020 / 16 = $63.75 per month
space: $540 / 16 = $33.75 per month
total: $97.50 per month

whitebox AMD (@ 24 systems per rack):
power: $1,020 / 24 = $42.50 per month
space: $540 / 24 = $22.50 per month
total: $65.00 per month

Sun AMD: power: $1,020 / 40 = $25.50 per month
space: $540 / 40 = $13.50 per month
total: $39.00 per month

Looking at a straight line analysis of the combined costs of server + OS + space + power over 36 months we end up with:

Intel + commercial Linux:
$3,000 + (3 * $1,280) + (36 * $97.50) = $10,350.00 over 3 years

whitebox AMD + commercial Linux:
$3,000 + (3 * $1,280) + (36 * $65.00) = $9,180.00 over 3 years

whitebox AMD + Solaris:
$3,000 + (3 * $120) + (36 * $65.00) = $5,700.00

Sun AMD + Solaris:
$3,000 + (3 * $120) + (36 * $39.00) = $4,764.00

Based on this analysis the Sun solution is less than half the cost of running Linux on Intel hardware.

A key consideration: data center space is a limited commodity over which we have minimal control. We can "reserve" space for expansion, but this requires additional expenses. A solution that allows us to maximize the space we purchase is a significant advantage, as this allows for much more cost effective growth.

------------------

ps. note comments have been turned on.

pps. And to that point, The Register just published an excellent analysis - and given the increasing scrutiny under which Gartner and IDC now find themselves, it'd probably help their credibility if they, like the financial analyst community, started disclosing revenues they receive from the vendors they cover. At their scale, vs. the smaller boutiques, I think it's going to become an imperative.

And personally, it may end up being a determinant of whether we're willing to do business with such firms. Transparency's a good thing.

Once you've read that, this is interesting reading, too...

Both for its content, and the context. Thanks for the pointer, Tim.

We just finished up Sun's annual Analyst Conference - where we bring financial and industry analysts together (they never seem to sit on the same side of the room), and present our updates and perspectives on the marketplace. (The above link is video and slides.)

The central topic of my presentation was free software - trying to answer the questions, especially from among the financial community, surrounding its impact on our financial results. Some still believe "free" can't be good for business - despite a rush of businesses predicated upon free. My point was that free software doesn't decrease revenue - it amplifies adoption. And radically simplifies customer acquisition and qualification.

To make the point, I invited Marc Andreesen to join me on stage - to talk about one of his (many) companies, Ning. Ning is all about accelerating the emergence of social software through the delivery of its infrastructure as a service (with some really inspired thinking about cloning and tipping effects). It's a very cool idea, run by some very smart people. And Ning is ground zero of the coming revolution in the IT marketplace: social software will drive more infrastructure and transactional volumes than the entirety of last decade's ERP build out. To prove the point, Sun runs its ERP implementation on a partially used 5 year old computer - vs. our developer communities and customer portals, which serve millions of users 24 hours a day requiring far more infrastructure.

But what's interesting to me about our relationship with Ning is that no one from Sun had ever paid them a visit. No one had ever made a sales call, cold or otherwise. Marc assumed he'd simply run Linux on a whitebox platform - yet it turned out to be twice as expensive as running Solaris on a SunFire server (a point many customers find surprising, which is both a good, and a bad, problem to have). See C|Net's coverage, here. And now he's become a Sun customer (I'll post his email to me detailing the math next week).

It's my view that the growth in front of Sun won't simply be from stabilizing and growing our existing customers. It'll be from acquiring new customers. Large customers as well as small. The important point is we won't be able to meet most of them - there aren't enough sales executives on the planet to call on each of the 4 million Solaris licenses we've distributed to the world. But so long as the internet connects us to them, the distribution of free software allows them to discover us - and for us to invest in building a bi-directional link, ultimately driving revenue from only those who want added services and infrastructure (vs. those who don't).

Which allows me to believe (perhaps hope) that the days of cold calling are numbered...

With that volume building, you've no doubt seen that HP has joined ranks with IBM to support Solaris on their x64 platforms - creating even more options, and leaving only one tier 1 vendor (based in Texas, rhymes with swell) without a committed Solaris support plan.

Having Solaris available on all these systems creates options for customers - as legacy systems near end of life, or as with Intel's Itanium, inch toward decommitment.

We also recognize that diversity and choice are important - which is why we've begun looking at the possibility of releasing Solaris (and potentially the entire Solaris Enterprise System), under dual open source licenses. CDDL (which allows customer IP to safely comingle with Solaris source code) and under the Free Software Foundation's GPL3. It's early days, but we're looking at two things as we make that decision.

First, we're looking at how to reach developers and customers who prefer the GPL - as a large GPL contributor, we want to do what we can to drive more efficiency and cross-pollination between Linux and OpenSolaris. (Why recreate the wheel with technologies like dTrace and ZFS - or GRUB and Xen.)

Second, bear in mind we've yet to pick the open source license under which the core intellectual property behind our multi-threaded Niagara systems will ship (although we're biasing to GPL). Is there opportunity for the two communities (OS and system) to interact? Surely...

In thinking through these issues, we've had help from a number of folks around the free software community - for which I want to express my appreciation. And there's obviously discussion that will continue. By everyone who values freedom of choice (and unfettered Fair Use, but that's another blog).

It's going to be a very interesting 2006 - no doubt filled with interesting choices.

If you want to know what a winning team looks like, it's this:

These folks have been focused on the education sector, and making fabulous progress. We spent lunch talking about augmenting our offer with OpenOffice, totally free of charge to students and administrators - in the classroom, at home, for their friends and families, too. Free software has the potential to save tens of millions of dollars in licensing fees, freeing Mexico and Mexican citizens to focus their investment on connecting classrooms to the internet. Not to mention hiring teachers and building schools. Free software's not about politics, it's about Participation.

I met with a series of customers - from the energy sector to retailing, banking to media. The challenges facing IT executives are becoming more global - and now that the infrastructure and networks can really support global scale, the solutions are coming into focus. And budgets are being freed up - that's obviously country specific, but Mexico is definitely looking to invest.

Before my departure, the local team had arranged a town hall meeting broadcast across Latin America - during the Q&A, a few folks wanted to know what I was going to write about in my blog. I responded by grabbing a camera, taking a photograph of the audience, and saying "that's what's going in my blog - I'm going to brag about YOU." Here:

The optimism is addictive... and again, great job, Jaime and Eduardo and to the whole team in Sun Latin America. If I were your competition, I'd worry seriously about all the smiling faces in the picture above...

1. Muhammad, aka #9 msaleem from Digg
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2. Ryan, aka #10 capn-caveman from Digg
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3. Roy, aka schestowitz from Digg
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4. Kam, aka _kam0_ #2 from Redditt & from Delicious
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Filed under: AOL

Filed under: AOL

1. David Strom is a very smart guy who's been thinking and writing about software and the Internet for a couple of decades. He has a great blog post about AOL software on his blog. It's a very harsh post from a very smart person--he has some great points.
2. Molly Wood, Veronica Belmont, and Tom Merrit do a great podcast that I listen to every single day at CNET called Buzz Outloud. They also have a great conversation about AOL software. They are also very harsh on AOL--but again, these are very smart people. Everyone at AOL should stop what they're doing right now (tell your boss I said it's OK), and listen to this podcast. At 3:46 in they are talking about how great it is that we are giving away free anti-virus software (we're the first major company to do it). They are so excited about it UNTIL they bring up the recent privacy issues with AOL and the ability to uninstall our software. They say: "if you've ever installed AIM you know how hard it is to get rid of" and "it gets it clutches deep within your computer--is this antivirus gonna be the same way?"
3. Danny Sullivan is a brilliant guy and he does an amazing podcast called the Daily SearchCast. I listen to it every single day. He did a special edition yesterday where he interviews Eric Schmidt and asks him about my proposal for search engines to not keep search data (7:45 in).

Filed under: AOL

You tend to fall in love with your first brand, and you can't let it go. And I did that with Silicon Alley Reporter magazine, and it's well documented that I could have sold it for 20 million bucks, and I didn't, and I got a fraction of that [when I eventually sold it], and then when the next [opportunity] came around, Weblogs, Inc., I sold it after 18 months, instead of holding the other brand [Silicon Alley Reporter] for six years, and I did much better in 18 months than I did in six years...

You have to always be confident that you are able to create another hit, you're not a one-hit wonder, and that your future is always brighter than your past. You can't live with this fear of losing this monster you created. And sometimes you gotta kill it, and I always give people the example of Bob Dylan, because when Bob Dylan took folk music as far as his interest in it...could go and then he said, "I want to do electric, it's more interesting to me," and there's that famous thing at Royal Albert Hall where somebody yells at him and says, "You're Judas," and [Dylan] says, "I don't believe you, you're a liiiiiiar," [laughter] and then he turns around to his band and he says, "Play real fuckin' louuuuuud," and then he turns around and he plays "Like a Rolling Stone," which is arguably his best song ever and he did some of his best work after that.

You have to reinvent yourself, and sometimes you have to kill your previous persona. I had to kill [my] Silicon Alley Reporter persona to become Weblogs, Inc. I'll have to kill Weblogs, Inc. to be Netscape, kill Netscape to be whatever comes after that. You can't live on your past brand, or else it owns you, and you no longer own it.

Filed under: social software

Filed under: AJAX, collaboration

Filed under: social networking, social software, social news

Filed under: search engines, social networking, reputation

Filed under: mapping, mashups

Filed under: companies, web 2.0

Filed under: companies, e-commerce

• First, if people wanted more in depth discussion - wouldn't the product descriptions and the buyer/seller feedback be less mass produced than they are now?  "Great customer!  Would sell to again for sure!" over and over again.  What percentage of the auction pages are mass produced by huge eBay store owners?
• Given that this will be a pure commercial space it seems like the promised land for comment spammers.  Will eBay be able to fight spam in a way that doesn't shut down discussion but works for users?
• Not sure that these mediums are the best suited for this context.  It seems like kind of an awkward application of two very hip, exciting tools.
• Tag support makes sense if implemented in conjunction with pre-selected categories and full text search.  Given the nature of this particular market, though, I wonder if this will be the space where we really see tag spam emerge in a big way for the first time.
• Internationalization of discourse will be an interesting mess to watch, I'm guessing.  Most businesses large enough to do a lot of international business mitigate language and cultural differences by hiring specialists to help with these issues.  Micro-businesses will not have these resources and I'll be curious to see how many miscommunications, previously silent prejudices and other communication issues emerge.
• Business blogging often helps build relationships between companies and their customers.  How much loyalty do you feel to any particular eBay store?  I'm guessing not very much.  Thumbs up, thumbs down on reputation may be enough reputation/communication system for the vast majority of eBay users.
  

Filed under: citizen media, MSM

Filed under: aggregators

One first step could be to examine a variety of leading sites of this type and that is what I've done below. It's arbitrary, it's unscientific and I think it's interesting. Last Friday evening I looked at the front page of 4 interesting memedigger sites and wrote down some numbers. Digg is clearly the standard, but also examined below are Reddit, the Spanish-language site Meneame and Hugg.com, a project of the hugely popular environmental blog Treehugger. I would have liked to include Newsvine, but was unable to find numbers to compare.

An overview of some observations:

• Front page items are more commented on in Reddit than Digg, relative to the number of points those items have recieved.
• Meneame seems to be successful in terms of votes but receives fewer comments.
• Hugg isn't being used very much. I am curious why.

• the total number of points listed for all items on the front page of the site
• the number of items listed
• the age of the oldest and second oldest items on the front page
• the total number of comments listed on the front page
• the estimated number of registered users in the system

• divided the average number of points held by each item on the front page of each service by the estimated number of registered users. This could be called the chance that any single item on the front page was given a point by any single registered users. This may serve to roughly estimate the breadth of participation in the system - a system where the items on the front page have received a relatively large number of votes relative to a relatively small number of users is one where there is greater agreement amongst users about what is important. This number may be more precise if it were calculated with the number of recently active users than total registered users.
• I did the same division as above with the number of comments listed. This may provide some insight into the amount of conversation that occurs on the various sites, at least regarding the items that are on the front page.

Four memediggers compared

Digg

6923 points on 15 items = 461 points per item on the front page

Oldest item listed is from 1 day 3 hours ago, 2nd oldest 21 hours ago.

832 comments = 55 comments per item on the front page.

There appears to be 178,625 total registered users.

Total points on front page divided by total users equals 0.04. That could mean that one out of roughly every 20 registered users has given a point to an item that is now on the front page.

Total comments divided by registered users equals 0.005. That could mean that one out of roughly every 200 registered users has left a comment on an item that is now on the front page.

Notes on Digg:

• There are 5955 pages of users. Users Thuglife and Diggitydank both appear after the 1000th page of most active users, in case you were wondering.
• The nearly 180,000 registered digg users is a far larger number than the 60,000 subscribers to Tech Crunch, lest you use the latter number to measure the impact of Web 2.0.
• Google search for site:http://digg.com/users has aprox 4 to 5 million results.

Reddit

3179 points on 25 items front page = 211 points per item

There are several items listed as from 1 day ago.

777 comments = 51 comments per item

Registered users appears to be undisclosed. Reddit representative has said that the site gets tens of thousands of users every day. Google search for site:http://reddit.com/user gets 209,000 results.

Note: Reddit has many additional features beyond news moderation.

Meneame, Spanish-language digg clone on tech

1882 points on 20 items = 94 points per item

Oldest post is 1 day and 10 hours, second oldest 1 day 5 hours.

192 comments on 20 items = 10 comments per item

There appears to be 4940 registered users.

Total points divided by total users = 0.38 That could mean that there is a roughly 40% chance that any single user has given a point to any item that is now on the front page. This could also mean that a high percentage of registered users continue to engage in ongoing use.

Total comments divided by total users = 0.04 That could mean that approximately 1 out of every 20 users have commented on a front page item.

Notes on Meneame:

Google site:http://meneame.net/user.php gets 22,000 results.

There were items with zero and 1 comment on the front page, both with more than 80 votes.

The site also includes a wiki for discussion of the service.

Hugg

92 points on 15 items = 6 comments per post on front page

Oldest item is from 1 day 3 hrs ago, 16 hrs is second oldest.

8 comments on front page.

There are 93 registered users.

Total points on front page divided by total users = .99 That could mean that every user has given a point to an item on the front page. The fact that this is unlikely demonstrates the inadequacy of this formula. I believe it indicates instead that the many of the relatively few active users find almost every item they give a point to appearing on the front page. Clearly the front page is of far less use to these readers than in other systems.

Total front page comments divided by total users = 0.09 That could mean that 1 in ten users have left a comment on an item on the front page. It is likely one or a few users have left more than one of the 8 comments.

Notes on Hugg:

Hugg is a project of the environmental blog Treehugger, for which Technorati has found 9,298 links from 2,943 sites. This indicates that the large Treehugger community is not into Hugg.

Of the 15 items on the front page, all were contributed by a total of 5 users.

One of the items on the front page when I visited was titled Jesus 'healed using cannabis'. I found that funny.

There are loads of big ads on Hugg, including from some of the biggest environmental organizations in the US.

Other memedigger or community moderated news sites that may be of interest:

Muti "Muti is a site inspired by Digg and reddit but dedicated to content of interest to Southern Africans or those interested in Southern Africa." See also the site's cool mashup of Google Maps and Yahoo News on Africa and elsewhere.

Crispynews Crispynews is hosted digg-clone software used by a wide variety of communities of interest. American Idol fans, Mormons, Brazillian hip-hop fans, etc.

Filed under: mashups

Filed under: nptech, social networking

The partnership between the film and the high profile online social network appears to be remarkably low-profile.  No press releases appear on PR Web, few bloggers outside of MySpace have written about it and a Google News search brings back surprisingly few results.  The MySpace community itself appears to be responding well, however, as almost 45,000 users have added the films as a friend to their profile in just less than a week.

Filed under: wireless media

Filed under: RSS

Filed under: blogging

Filed under: IM, nptech, RSS

Filed under: citizen media, podcasting, aggregators

Filed under: social networking

Filed under: Yahoo

Filed under: wireless media

While in the midst of something that doesn't afford me time to look much more closely, I just had to throw out an attaboy! to Amazon for their new "Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)" service.

Upload par-baked application... Amazon will bake (S3) and serve (EC2).

Last night I was alerted to a new Beta Video Search and UI for Live Search. It's still definitely in beta, but it shows a lot of promises with loads of additional features. I tested all of these sites with Firefox on both WinXP and OS X and to some extent on IE6, I did not notice any browser-specific issues. Here are some of the highlights:

Video Search:
This is a good Video Search. It has a clean, uncluttered UI with a single column of video results down the middle. The results show an image from the video with the major expected meta-data (title, format, quality, and genre). I was surprised to find the index size to be comparable to Google's and a third the size of Yahoo's for the searches I ran. The results also seemed accurate (I must not have looked in the right nooks and crannies).

Header:
The new header starts you out with 4 tabs (Web, Images, News, & Local).

To the right of those is a More tab that reveals a lot of other search options including Academic, Video, Feeds, and Products (all in Beta), as well as options for managing Search Macros. One thing to note about the Product search is how clearly they have marked that this is coming from the MSN Shopping portal as opposed to a web crawl.

As you select verticals from the More tab they stay pinned to your header providing more control. It’s handy to be able to customize your search experience that way. If Video Search keeps rising in prominence I expect it will be added to the intial tabs on the page.

Image Search Scratchpad:
The Live Image Search UI is among the best out there. The dynamic scroll, the image pop-outs, and the slider for changing slides really make a difference. In this release they are adding a Scratchpad that will allow you to save collections of images. The index quality still needs improvement, but I definitely see progress in that area.

Live Search is definitely showing a web centric view of the world and trying to turn their product into a serious research app. I hope the Scratchpad feature is added across all of the verticals (I expect this will happen) and then eventually tied into Onfolio (the recently purchased client-side RSS Reader).

Seth Godin's Web 2.0 Watch List, built with alexaholic, is a fabulous idea. I wish I'd thought of it. Rankings are fun and thought-provoking, and as Seth figured, they also get lots of attention!

But Seth completely misses the point of Web 2.0 when he says "For our purposes, my definition is that most of these companies are, as the wikipedia says, sites that 'let people collaborate and share information online in a new way.' So, Google doesn't make the cut, because most of their traffic comes to their search engine. eBay is an "old" company, but the many-to-many nature of the site means that they do."

What a short-sighted definition! It seems to focus much more on the Web 1.0 aspect of explicit "community" than the web 2.0 concept of harnessing collective intelligence. If Google doesn't do this, I don't know who does! PageRank was a breakthrough in search because Google figured out that what people do (make links) is as important as what the documents contain. And Adsense is profoundly participatory. Amazon too is a master at harnessing participation but doesn't make Seth's list. Meanwhile, we see companies like pandora, which are purely algorithmic in their personalization, and zillow, which is database driven without any community features. These sites are incredibly useful applications, but Seth's list sure seems to draw the Web 2.0 boundary in some very odd ways.

In addition, even participation (both explicit and implicit) is only part of web 2.0. Can someone really say that Google Maps or Amazon's Simple Storage Service is not Web 2.0? And why are open source projects like Django and Drupal included but not Apache or Perl's CPAN, or sourceforge and slashdot? And if we're including invididual blogs, why zefrank.com and not techcrunch?

In short, this is a brilliant idea that needs some serious tweaking.

Evan Williams (CEO of podcasting company Odeo) has a great podcasting survey, using Alexa data and his view of the market to evaluate all of the podcasting companies and their traffic. I love seeing his interpretation of the data, and obviously that he's blogged this instead of just sending it around internally.

Don't know why this didn't get noticed before: the excellent Web 2.0 bullshit generator. Not as funny as Web 2.0 or Star Wars character?, but still worth a spin. In the heyday of the last bubble, I remember going into a conference room in a shared-office complex (so I don't know whose bs it was), seeing the business plan brainstorm on the whiteboard, and thinking that someone ought to come out with a magnetic poetry kit (in that case, a magnetic bs kit) for generating the style of business plan that was on that board. This is the electronic version of the same idea.

Ultimately, success in any business is about creating value, not about being buzzword compliant. So sites that make fun of the buzzwords provide a very useful reminder.

Chris McAskill of SmugMug wrote in email:

I noticed your fascination with Interestingness (we're fans too) and thought you'd appreciate a pretty compelling variation. We silently introduced this a couple of months ago to see how it would work without telling anyone.

Our customers tend to be families, soccer moms, travelers...not as geeky as Flickr's customers. They understand words like most popular and understand star ratings and thumbs up/down. They hate to be asked to register to leave a comment, even if it means just giving their email, and even writing a comment is kind of a hassle 80% of the time.

So we instituted a not-very-gameable (you could, but you'd have to be determined) simple thing: when you hover your mouse over an image, you get a thumb-up or thumb-down. No need to register.
We combine the thumb ratings with comment ratings and end up with a browse page of most popular photos for the day that gets over a million people per day dropping by to see and cast their votes.

Almost all our subscribers let democracy speak and flaunt their most popular photos on their home pages: [here's mine]. And communities do the same. Here's >a flowers community. You can sort by most popular in any category or keyword, etc.... Pretty nifty? It's a different way to skin the cat for a broad, consumer audience.

Whether it's pagerank at Google, interestingness at Flickr, or diggs, or SmugMug's most popular feature, we see all across the web attempts to incorporate human intelligence into web applications. As I've written many times, harnessing collective intelligence is the very heart of Web 2.0. And that intelligence is distinguished by its bionic nature: we're building applications that are a fusion of human and machine.

At the Web 2.0 Conference, we have a feature called the Launch Pad, which is the opportunity for a new company to make their debut. This year, John Battelle, the program chair for the Web 2.0 Conference, has recruited a stellar team to help us winnow through the companies applying to be featured. It includes VCs, M&A strategists from some of the major companies in the Web 2.0 talent hunt, and a couple of Web 2.0 pundits (besides me and John, that is), so it's a great opportunity to get some exposure, even if you don't get selected for one of the Launch Pad slots. For a complete list of the Launch Pad advisory board, and more details, see John's posting, Help us find the companies that will launch at Web 2.0.

We have more than a hundred submissions already, competing for a dozen or so slots on the conference program, but there are so many interesting new companies popping up that we could easily miss some really interesting ones. So, like John, I'm asking you to let us know if you want to be considered for the Launch Pad at Web 2.0.

Back at our first P2P conference in 2001, one of the most thought-provoking talks was entitled Napster Fabbing. Marshall Burns and James Howison posited that with the rise of , we could look forward to a future in which not just songs but stuff would be shared over p2p networks. After all, in a world of digitally-driven fabrication machines, what is stuff but a set of instructions?(Biology works that way already.)

We're not there yet for digital fabrication, but in classic news from the future form, we're seeing headlines that show us moving bit-by-bit in that direction. One such headline came from Phil Torrone on the Make: blog, who reported on the first sewing pattern delivered by iTunes.

Phil waggishly noted: "ok, we got our CRAFT itunes thing going - at 11:19pm PDT the first sewing pattern over itunes was delivered a "Stretch boob tube with drawstring bottom. Hipster shorts with scoop sides." - and i'm ok with this being how i spend my friday nights. so yes, we used a series of tubes, to deliver a tube top"

(And actually, Make: has been delivering hardware designs as RSS enclosures for iTunes for a while. They're not yet for personal fab labs, just for human consumption, but the trend is coming into focus...)

The University of Chicago's Rick Stevens has published a lengthy but interesting -- even for an outsider -- survey of how the use of web services is picking up in the realms of bioinformatics and computational biology.

It's interesting how books, papers and journals, the traditional open wares of academia and the sciences are slowly being succumbed by first open source scientific applications, and now open data web services.

It is likely that several of the commercial search engine companies (e.g. Google and Microsoft) will explore the issue of coupling biological searches of open literature and databases with computational services with access to commercial tools and databases. These tools will most likely be emerging examples of coupling commercial tools (web services infrastructure, indexing and search technologies) with the best of the open science literature.

Not only do these new web services help the scientific community, but if Google, Microsoft or others (Wikipedia?) pick up on it as Stevens predicts, it will mean a true revolution for any science fair kid with a computer.

Over on Farber's IP list, Simon Phipps sent in another sobering note about our eroding freedoms, pointing to a blog entry entitled Aerial Photography Considered Harmful:

"On my recent trip back from India on British Airways, I was inspired by Julieanne Kost's recent book, Window Seat...to snap some landscape photos at 35000 feet. I think we were over Iran at the time. After taking several shots, imagine my surprise when one of the BA attendants closed the window shade and informed me that it was against British Airways policy for passengers to take such photos for security reasons. I thought she was kidding, but the head attendant confirmed what I had been told. And that it had nothing to do with where we were flying."

(While I cited this entry because of the civil liberties implications, you should check out the blog entry. The images Josh Simons snapped before he was stopped are stunning. (For that matter, so are Julianne's images in the book, incidentally published by O'Reilly.))

It's reassuring to know that the technology our culture discards so eagerly lives a full and useful life elsewhere:

With the number of cell phones in use worldwide hitting 2 billion and rising, recycled phones are playing a crucial role in the spread of wireless communications across the developing world, where land lines can be costly or unavailable.

The odds are good that a refurbished cell phone in the pocket of a user in Bolivia, Jamaica, Kenya, Ukraine or Yemen originated with ReCellular Inc. Based in small-town Michigan, ReCellular gets 75,000 used phones a week - most collected in charity fundraisers - and refurbishes them for sale around the world.

In a conversation the other day, Ed Kummer of Disney made a really thought-provoking observation: the spread of solar energy units to homes and businesses is an analog to other forms of user-generated content, and the overall trend towards a two-way network. While it's possible to set up a solar system completely off the grid, most of the new customers feed power into the grid during sunlight hours, and draw from it when the daylight wanes. If we move to a solar power economy, it will be much more distributed and cooperative than the current one-way model.

It's fabulous to put the internet and Web 2.0 into a broader context, and to think about how the new network economics that we're seeing on the internet may be adopted in other fields. With VoIP, we're seeing the internet subsume the telephone network. With distributed solar, and the kinds of distributed energy monitoring technology that Adam wrote about the other day, will the internet model also colonize the power grid?

Hmmm... What was I saying about the internet as the network of networks?

Slashdot coincidently celebrates ;-) the opening of our call for participation for the 2007 edition of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and this year's theme, "Sufficiently advanced technology," with an Ask Slashdot open question on "computer voodoo":

A corollary to 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' is that sometimes users have to resort to what I call 'computer voodoo.' You don't know why it works, you barely care how it works, but you find yourself doing the strangest things because it just seems to work. I'm talking about things like: smacking a PC every 5 seconds for an hour to keep it from stalling on a hard drive reformat (with nary a problem after the reformat); or figuring out the only way to get a PC partially fried by lightning to recognize an ethernet card, after booting into Windows, is to start the computer by yanking the card out and shoving it back in (thereby starting the boot processes). What wacky stuff have you done that makes no obvious sense, but just works?

This puts me in mind of the wifi-dowsing performed by attendees at conferences who wander about, open laptop in hand, trying desperately to get a better signal and faster throughput.

And as a further warm-up to this year's focus on technology that's "indistinguishable from magic," I point you at a wonderful bibliography of magic in UI design assembled by Mike Kuniavsky, most recently known for his well-dugg magic wand prototype.

There's a very thought-provoking article on the O'Reilly Network's MacDevCenter, reading between the lines of Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote:

After welcoming the audience of developers, Jobs let the audience know that others would help him on stage. This, in and of itself, was unusual. There are often supporting roles in the WWDC and MacWorld keynotes but only one featured artist. Not only did Jobs share the stage with Bertrand Serlet, Phil Schiller, and Scott Forstall, but he allowed them to make many of the morning's announcements. In a way, they represented the three faces of Steve.

In his email newsletter, MacDevCenter editor Derrick Story expanded on this point: "As these Apple heavy hitters made the various announcements that Steve often handles, I couldn't help thinking that Apple once again is planning ahead. Steve Jobs won't be CEO forever. Others are going to have to share the heavy lifting." Thought-provoking.

The article also had a couple of other tidbits that struck me:

1. Continuing with my thoughts about application dialtone, the new Time Machine feature could be described as dialtone for backups: "This new Mac OS X application is designed to help users backup and restore their data. Forstall said that in their estimation only 26 percent of users back up their data. Most of these, however, do so in a manual and ad hoc way. Every once in a while they burn some files to a CD. Only 4 percent have a regular automated backup strategy. Time Machine is automatic backup for the Mac.... The Time Machine UI is stunning. It allows people to look at a directory and zoom back in time until they find the file that is missing or has been changed."

2. As further evidence of the trend we've been watching about the importance of power rather than pure performance as one of the key competitive factors in the coming market, "The Mac Pro is built around a pair of Dual-Core Intel Xeon 5100 processors available at 2GHz, 2.66GHz, or 3GHz.... Schiller stressed the improvements in performance per watt saying that this new chip is three times more efficient than the G5." While Apple's is a consumer offering, power per watt becomes even more important in data-center heavy Web 2.0 applications.

The other day, I was explaining to a reporter how I could be lumping in cellphones and the next generation of sensor networks into Web 2.0. "Well, Web 2.0 is really not just about the web. It's really about the next generation of internet applications, and includes things like P2P file sharing and VoIP, which aren't based on the web at all. And actually, now that I mention it, it's really not even about the internet, narrowly defined as a class of TCP/IP-based networks. It's really about the internet as it was originally conceived, as a 'network of networks.'"

Those of you who were around in the 1980s will know just what I'm talking about, because that was originally what people meant by "the internet." The term literally came into wide use to refer to a whole set of distinct but increasingly interoperable networks: the ARPAnet, CSnet, DECnet, the UUCPnet, EUnet, NLnet, FIDOnet.... In the late 80s, we actually published a book called !%@: A Directory of Electronic Mail Addressing and Networks, which covered how to address email across 190 distinct networks. (The title !%@ was homage to some of the many special addressing characters that were used before the @ crowded out all the others.) The inter-net was the interoperable network that came to connect them.

It's good to remember this broad definition of "the internet," because the internet is not just about TCP/IP, though it is about the principles that made the TCP/IP based network win out over all the others, and become the lingua franca of interoperability that it is today. We're pushing the boundaries of the old internet, as it comes to include the cellphone network, telematics networks, and other emerging forms of connectivity.

So let's ask, where else can we apply the principles that we're learning from the internet?

Round 2: A series of occasional postings around the theme that patterns and ideas recur, or as Arlo Guthrie said in Alice's Restaurant, "come around again on the gee-tar."