People Love the Sun Ray Idea, Sun Hardware, Google Browser Sync, and Rays from the Other End

Awhile back, James and I got a briefing from the Sun Ray folks. The idea of a Sun Ray is very “the network is the computer,” and, really it’s pretty cool. If you’re using all the right technology and software, you can insert your smart card in LA at 8AM, do some work in Excel or Word (or, Open Office if you prefer ;>), leave everything as it is, jump on a flight to New York, insert your smart card into your New York Sun Ray, and BLAM-O see all everything as you left it.

More realistically, this could come in handy for working on different machines in the same building or shuttling between your office and home machine. Though, it’d kind of suck if you had to move your work setup to home, but we’ll leave worrying about that as an exercise for the reader.

The American TCO Dilemma

Despite this idea being cool, it hasn’t taken off like, say, the browser or even USB thumb-drives have. As always, the main problem is probably a combination of (a.) up-front price, and, (b.) proprietary technology. I’ve been paying attention to Sun quite a lot recently, and their biggest problem among the group of tech people I roll with are always those two issues. For example, people say, “why don’t I just buy a cheap Dell,” and, “Solaris?”

As René Wienholtz of STRATO pointed out in the last episode of RedMonk Radio, adding Ubuntu support to Niagara will do something to address the second problem. But the first problem is a tougher nut to crack. Maybe if Sun started selling hardware at Wal-mart. (I’m only half kidding.)

The issue is, to try out a moniker for it, is The American TCO Dilemma. That dilemma is that American developers and tech-heads who’re buying hardware don’t want to go through the time and effort to TCO out hardware: they’re fixed on one number: price. So, if you’re selling expensive but brutally performant hardware to them, such as UltraSPARCs or mainframes, their reply, at best will be, “why don’t I just get 5 blades for the price of one of those?” and you’re conversation is over. More typically, they’ll use the word “Dell” instead of “blade.”

I call this The American TCO Dilemma because many of the customers we talk to or hear about who’ve bought the “luxury hardware” seem to be European. Being completely anecdotal, this leads me think that Europeans may not suffer from that glazed eye look when you utter “TCO.”

My gut feel is that American IT culture would rather learn by suffering than learn by planning. If that’s the case, then there’s not much hope for the higher end hardware to capture initial sales: we don’t fetishize high-end hardware the way we do sports cars and Apple products in America. In fact, quite the opposite.

Rube Goldberg Rays

The idea of a Sun Ray is still cool: moving your, to get all early 90’s on you, “virtual context” from machine to machine. People want it, and why not?

Google Browser Sync

News of Google Browser Sync sparked (hey-o!) off this post. It’s by no means a complete implementation of the Sun Ray idea, and indeed, it’s only within the context of one application, but a very important application, your browser:

You can leave a few sites up in your browser at work and just go home. When you get there, resync your browser and you will be asked whether you’d like to restore any of the last session’s open sites to your current Firefox instance. If you’re too lazy to bookmark, or just can’t always ensure that you’re planning ahead, this feature alone could be worth all the cookies in the Oreo factory. —Anders Bylund

That is, your browser (well, FireFox), will act just like the Sun Ray’s ability to move your “virtual context” around. Sure, no Sun Ray, but a part of the idea.

U3 Drives

Another virtual context switcher are U3 enabled USB drives. Or, as they call them “the traveling office.” U3 is a format that several USB drive manufacturers have come up with to, frankly, add more value and differentiation to their highly commoditized market. The idea is that you can install select Windows application on the U3 drive and they can run off that drive no matter what Windows machine you plug them into. There’s no install to be done and any registry madness is taken care of by the U3 drive.

Being a Mac person, I haven’t played with them. Scott Clark has a good write-up. I don’t believe the U3 people have the idea of capturing the state of your desktop, and popping it back up when you plug the drive in, but they’re half-way there.

I went over this line of thinking at length during the Pervasive OEM roundtable last month, and it was one of the topics people seemed most interested in.

Rays without the Sun…?

You can often hear us RedMonkers say something along the lines of, “there’s nothing new in technology.” What we mean by that is more than just the “old wine in new bottles” idea (though, wouldn’t it be more profitable to have new wine in old bottles?), but that there are new attempts at old ideas all the time. As Moore’s and other’s laws kick in, past failures at ideas can be reconsidered.

It follows, then, that if you’ve tried out some implementation of an idea, and it’s not panning out as widely as you’d hoped, you might want to try a different approach. As I’ve said, in technology, you must be a rapid feedback loop nut-job.

As usual, Google will probably bring submit to their fatal flaw and take the Google Browser Sync to 80% completion and then never touch it again (see blogger, GMail, Google base, etc. Inquire with James for more details.). And who knows if U3 will get itself outside of the Windows ghetto or start adding in new features: peripheral manufactures are a weird lot as well when it comes to product management. It’s difficult for software people to understand hardware and vice-versa.

But, it’s clear to me that the desire of having a synchronized web and desktop exists. Arguably, those two concepts are one in the same, but technologically, they’re somewhat separate at the moment, as Charles and I discuss in this week’s DrunkAndRetired.com podcast.

The SunRay folks are in a good position, understanding and concept-wise, to work more on that idea, but they’ll need something much more light weight and cheaper than big-iron backed and gussied up exported X with SmartCards. Even making an off-the-shelf USB drive a “SmartStick,” so to speak, would be a big first step.

Of course, I’m a software guy, so I easily hardware as interchangeable. Which is the whole point, isn’t it?

Disclaimer: Sun and Pervasive are client.

Technorati Tags: desktop, google, mobile, redmonkadvice, sunray, sunw, synchronizedweb, u3, usb