A couple of days ago I posted a piece entitled “No, but God, we’d love to!” which I said captured what I want Sun to be, and asked Jonathan if he was listening. He was, and he asked what I meant. So here goes.
Over the years, I’ve talked to many of Sun’s customers (as well as companies that ought to be our customers!). Now maybe it’s just because customers get bemused by my job title, but I find that most of these conversations follow a pattern. Quite simply, the customer expects to talk to Sun about how the hard problems in computing are going to be solved. Of course there may be contemporary issues to be discussed – a product release, a support problem, a pricing gap – but underlying it all is the expectation that Sun’s the company to talk to about the future technology of computing. Not just the future of business models, or the future of supply chain management, or even the future of intellectual property. Moreover the conversation is usually about the big picture, about a “we” that embraces Sun, our customers, and our partners and competitors. It’s not simply about Sun’s perspective, or Sun’s products. I get the impression (and sometimes the explicit assurance) that it’s a very different conversation from that which they have with IBM, Microsoft, HP, Dell, EMC, Cisco, or Oracle.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, of course. Ever since I’ve been with Sun, we’ve had noisy, energetic, contrarian technologists on the front lines – folks like Bill Joy, Tom Lyons, Rob Gingell, James Gosling, Greg Papadopoulous, John Gage, Andy Bechtolsheim, Jim Waldo, Whit Diffie, Michael Powell, Graham Hamilton, Hal Stern, Randy Rettberg, Bert Sutherland and many others. And they’re not just emeritus uber-geeks: they are building stuff. Cool stuff. Today. They’re changing the way people think about problems. And customers recognize that. The upshot is that when I visit [name deleted] we’re not just talking about the features of the next point release of a product; we’re discussing the big picture, the hard problems that we are all wrestling with, customers and suppliers alike.
Now of course the great challenge is how to monetize this. It’s no good if the customer takes the fruits of our conversation and buys a bunch of Dell 1Us, slaps Red Hat on them, hacks some JSPs on Tomcat and rolls out yet another DIYIT (“do it yourself IT”) solution. And (pace Slash-Dot) the answer isn’t for us to simply open-source everything and trust in the beneficence of Eric’s Bazaar. But neither is it to focus on proving that JES on Solaris on Athlon or Niagara can be as cheap as Red Hat (with the help of a creative pricing model). We need the pricing model, but if we lead with pricing instead of technology, customers will be confused.
Fundamental customer perceptions of a company don’t change rapidly, if at all. IBM is still “Big Blue” (“Father knows best”). Microsoft is still a PC software company; we got so used to rebooting regularly that we expect it. HP is still about printers and (deep down) scientific calculators. And Sun? We’re a company of creative, contrarian, imaginative, curious geeks. We’re the guys that zig when everybody else zags. We’re “The Network is the Computer”. We have to figure out how to leverage that, use it as part of our business model, while being careful not to behave in ways that blatantly conflict with that image. Because being seen as a the company whose response to a thorny problem is, “No, but God, we’d love to!” is priceless.