Jonathan Schwartz's Blog

Sunday Jun 25, 2006

60 Days into the Job...

60 days into my new job, and I'm sharing an award with Steve Ballmer and Linus Torvalds. Two individuals (sharing the company of many others) I would never presume to count out, but apparently Business 2.0 does. It's an honor to share their company.

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...

Posted on 09:10AM Jun 25, 2006 | Comments[21]

Friday Jun 16, 2006

Ubuntu on Niagara, and Platinum Ringtones

I'd like to offer my heartiest congratulations to the Mark Shuttleworth and the Ubuntu community - what's Ubuntu? The fastest growing GNU/Linux distro out there (and as you know, volume matters). Dapper Drake is now officially available on the Sun's UltraSPARC platform, the world's only GPL microprocessor, fueling the world's most power efficient server platform. Expanding SPARC beyond Solaris to Linux opens new markets for everyone.

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...

Posted on 01:06PM Jun 16, 2006 | Comments[20]

Saturday Jun 10, 2006

Answer to the Roof Riddle

In answering the prior question...

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).

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

Posted on 09:50PM Jun 10, 2006 | Comments[18]

Thursday Jun 08, 2006

A Roof in Midtown Manhattan

I was on a plane flight with an executive from the hospitality industry not too long ago, who told me a very interesting story - about the impact of flat panel televisions on hotel room occupancy. According to this exec, flat panel TV's drove down industry occupancy rates.

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?

Posted on 08:47AM Jun 08, 2006 | Comments[42]

Friday Jun 02, 2006

Sunlight is the Best Informant

I was with a big potential customer yesterday - in the Fortune 100. After a day of briefings from our technical folks, I joined the meeting to see how we were doing. I asked him and his team how much of what they'd seen was new to them.

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.