{"id":410,"date":"2005-11-29T15:45:32","date_gmt":"2005-11-29T22:45:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp\/?p=410"},"modified":"2005-11-29T15:45:32","modified_gmt":"2005-11-29T22:45:32","slug":"sun-putting-the-dot-in-web-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/sun-putting-the-dot-in-web-20\/","title":{"rendered":"Sun: putting the dot in web 2.0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><DIV>I am sure neither Sun nor the market at large particularly wants to be reminded of the dotcom boom and subsequent bust. And yet&#8230;<\/DIV><DIV>&nbsp;<\/DIV><DIV>There do seem to be substantive changes going on in the market, that are worth noting.<\/DIV><DIV>&nbsp;<\/DIV><DIV>I don&#8217;t want to push the &#8220;Google IPO as Netscape IPO, ten years later&#8221;,&nbsp;angle too hard. There are obvious differences-not least the fact Google, unlike Netscape in 1995,&nbsp;is generating scads of cash, which it can reinvest in purchasing lots of west coast startups, thus fueling more Web 2.0 style companies. <\/DIV><DIV>&nbsp;<\/DIV><DIV>Web 2.0 in my opinion is not all hype, and Google can be seen as a harbinger of further change.<\/DIV><DIV>&nbsp;<\/DIV><DIV>There is plenty of dark fibre out there to support, say,&nbsp;a world of millions of&nbsp;&#8220;TV stations&#8221;, vblogging on steroids. [I am sure the naysayers will argue that we can&#8217;t create compelling TV. But the mainstream media often seems to be a race to the bottom, and that&#8217;s somewhere that a smart guy can compete. If all big media companies can do is make reality TV shows and other crap then lightweight personal netcasting wave is set to wash over them.] <\/DIV><DIV>&nbsp;<\/DIV><DIV>The bandwidth is there but more <STRONG>processing power<\/STRONG> will be required. Which is where Sun can come in.<\/DIV><DIV>&nbsp;<\/DIV><DIV>I noticed an item from news.com today that made me think about Sun and its future.&nbsp;<A href=\"http:\/\/news.com.com\/eBay+to+buy+hundreds+of+Sun+x86+servers\/2110-1010_3-5973926.html?part=rss&amp;tag=5973926&amp;subj=news\">eBay to buy hundreds of Sun x86 servers<\/A>. It turns out PayPal is also evaluating Sun&#8217;s new T1 Ultasparc line.<\/DIV><DIV>&nbsp;<\/DIV><DIV>The eBay story follows news that Google is going to buy some of the new elegant Sun kit too&#8230; &#8220;<A href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/archives\/000970.html\">I am your density<\/A>&#8220;. You know Sun has got to be talking to MSN &#8211; and Sun is now a <A href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/monkchips\/24056847\/in\/set-550822\/\">Windows poster child<\/A>. <\/DIV><DIV>&nbsp;<\/DIV><DIV>If Sun was just selling to a couple of huge internet players, the Web 2.0 buildout wouldn&#8217;t necessarily mean much in terms&nbsp;of server sales. But a Sun that is savvy to postgres, and is integrating its middleware stack with it, and offering <A href=\"http:\/\/www.netbeans.org\/kb\/articles\/ebay-sdk.html\">NetBeans tutorials on eBay service development<\/A>, well that&#8217;s a little more interesting.&nbsp;&nbsp;Feedlounge, a feed-driven startup,&nbsp;is <A href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/sogrady\/archives\/001113.html\">porting to Postgres<\/A> from MySQL.<\/DIV><DIV>&nbsp;<\/DIV><DIV>Sun&#8217;s latest market share numbers, according to IDC, are <A href=\"http:\/\/www.line56.com\/articles\/default.asp?ArticleID=7121\">somewhat disappointing again<\/A> &#8211; customers were maybe holding off from purchasing Sun&#8217;s &#8220;legacy&#8221; gear because they wanted to get hold of the new stuff.<\/DIV><DIV>&nbsp;<\/DIV><DIV>But sooner or later new Sun wins are going to kick in. As I have said before, when they do, Sun will look undervalued in short order. Sun to benefit from a Web 2.0 halo? Stranger things have happened. And let&#8217;s understand this is a <A href=\"http:\/\/blogs.sun.com\/roller\/page\/jonathan\/20051111\">formal strategy<\/A> based on volume economics, driven by Jonathan Schwartz, not an accident. He calls it the <A href=\"http:\/\/blogs.sun.com\/roller\/page\/jonathan\/20050404\">Participation Age<\/A>. <\/DIV><DIV><DIV>&nbsp;<\/DIV><DIV>If you&#8217;re an enterprise I would say check out the new Sun x86 boxes; you&#8217;ll likely be impressed. Sun didn&#8217;t go volume crazy in the 1990s because of a marketing slogan &#8211; it sold hot boxes too. It&#8217;s back in that game.<\/DIV><DIV>&nbsp;<\/DIV><\/DIV><DIV>Maybe I should have called this post <STRONG>Sun:&nbsp;Putting the IP in Participation<\/STRONG>. Or maybe Jonathan can riff off that&#8230;<\/DIV><DIV>&nbsp;<\/DIV><DIV><\/p>\n<p>addendum:<br \/>\nJust got dinged (probably deservedly) by ZDNet&#8217;s David Berlind for not communicating the fact Sun is a client. Sorry. As regular readers will know, Sun is indeed a client.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am sure neither Sun nor the market at large particularly wants to be reminded of the dotcom boom and subsequent bust. And yet&#8230;&nbsp;There do seem to be substantive changes going on in the market, that are worth noting.&nbsp;I don&#8217;t want to push the &#8220;Google IPO as Netscape IPO, ten years later&#8221;,&nbsp;angle too hard. There<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wfjh-6C","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}