Sun = the RIAA of the computer industry?
According to this New York Times article, Sun seems to be losing a few $billion. This has caused the stock to crash. Sun has roughly $6 billion more in the bank to lose, so don’t look for them to show up in bankruptcy court anytime soon. Still, perhaps there is an analog here. The record companies are suffering because the only thing that they have to sell is the CD, which was introduced more than 20 years ago and which is a derivative of the 125-year-old Edison cylinder. Sun is suffering because its main product is a 33-year-old operating system, Unix, that has been only incrementally improved, and the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), developed by IBM in the late 1970s. What else does Sun have to sell? Java, which is kind of a strange mix of 1970s ideas (from C and Smalltalk). When your products are this old it is easy for competitors to build cheaper knock-offs. Sun has been remarkably unlucky in that the knockoff, GNU/Linux, was built mostly by volunteers and that its price is $0.
In the case of recorded music the solution is pretty obvious, i.e., some sort of subscription service that delivers music conveniently to the consumer wherever he or she happens to be. The details might be intricate but it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to believe something could be built that people would want to buy. Can we say the same for Sun?
The market for “solutions” to the IT problems of rich and confused big companies would seem to belong solidly to IBM. The market for complex desktop applications and professionally-configured desktop operating systems would seem to belong solidly to Microsoft. Slugging it out with Intel in the hardware market seems like a losing game. In fact, Sun appears incapable of competing in any current computing market.
What does that leave? How about a completely new infrastructure for computing? No user would ever have to configure his or her network (a friend went to a dinner party last weekend in which a 70-year-old woman related her 3-hour support call with the cable modem company; “I did a lot of pinging”). No user would ever see a hierarchical file system with directories or folders. No user would ever be asked by an application program whether he or she wanted to “save changes?” People would have access to their data and computing power from wherever they happened to be. Sun could sell the devices (handheld, desktop, laptop, in-wall). Sun could sell the servers that made it all work. It would all be 100% proprietary so that Sun could make some profit. That’s my best idea. WinXP, Unix and the MacOS all look extremely similar when you step back a bit from the problem. The people for whom these are acceptable systems already have bought as much computer as they need. The big untapped market is among people who aren’t willing to devote a big part of their lives to the care and feeding of this style of operating system.
Perhaps the process would start with Sun buying a cable TV and a cellular phone company in one city and writing code until half of the businesses and citizens in that town were hooked.
Let’s see if the comment section yields some better ideas for Sun…
