Sun’s Scott McNealy Speaks at Potomac Officers Club

May 7th, 2008 by David Link

Yesterday afternoon I met Sun Microsystems’ Chairman and Co-Founder Scott McNealy at an event that the Potomac Officers Club sponsored at the Tysons Corner Ritz Carlton. Scott was delivering a terrific speech in which I learned a lot of interesting facts about Sun’s open source initiatives. As Chairman of the company who coined the phrase “The network is the computer” his prediction continues to be fascinating, especially with Sun’s focus on Open Source software initiatives

To start off, Scott gave a very funny Top 10 list: “How the IT world is like our lovable Government and Washington establishment”. (Several of these were LOL for me!) A few of my favorites:

• Each has a different plan for Security
• Both are huge cost centers with creative budget practices
• Both are trying to secure our ports
• Both invented the Internet
• Both generate a log of “hot air”
• Source code and Legislation are equally unreadable and buggy
• Random misuse of power from the Mayflower Hotel to the Datacenter

Scott talked about the world today with millions of new users of the internet, over 10 billion videos watched on the internet on a regular basis and the internet’s impact of disintermediation of traditional revenue producing business models:

• E-bay and Craigslist– disrupts the media business and want-ads revenue stream
• Amazon.com disrupts the book/publishing business and becomes the worlds electronic card catalogue
• Youtube is disinter mediating TV with their videos
• Curriki is creating the new online coarse curriculum displacing scholastic books which we spend $4.3 Billion annually.

Webtone

Scott then talked about the impact Sun’s open source initiatives of the future of Webtone.

Scott described 3 critical factors that open source will need to sustain orderly growth:

• Standards - as everyone gets connected standards DO matter.
• Intellectual Property – The rules of IP on a global stage are super important
• No one owns the language - the language of the internet should be free

He said,

“as everyone gets connected the governance as well as sheer momentum helps us to decide which side of the road is the right side to drive on. We can’t forever be battling it out to decide which side to drive or we will forever be having collisions. Standards create scale, efficiency, and dramatically reduce the filters and inefficient translations that are required without standards.”

Open Source

Last, some interesting facts about Sun’s Open Source stack:

• 70,000 downloads of MySQL per day
• 1 Million downloads of Open Office per week - Open office is the largest opensource project on the planet
• Java is running on over 6 billion devices - can anyone remember a java security breach??
• 13 Million Solaris 10 downloads – interestingly HP is the #1 platform used for Open Solaris… and currently OpenSolaris runs on over 1000 non-Sun machines
• Sun has invested over $26 Billion as a gift to the global IT industry with it’s Open Source Initiatives
• Sun continues to invest over $2 Billion a year in R&D, which places it in the Top 43 companies (across all industries) in the entire WORLD for R&D spending

Scott said that technology has the shelf life of a banana! The beauty of open source is that it extends the life of technology 30-40+ years… As you can imagine if you store an archive document in an opensource solution (MySQL) you can always run the application because you have the original source code to fall back upon in the future.

Overall, it was an inspirational speech on the future of open source and Sun’s incredible dedication to this movement. With the future of cloud computing and global webtone growth, Sun’s message from almost a decade ago “The network is the computer” has never been timelier, than it is today.

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May 7th, 2008