Sun challenges Microsoft on the desktop

AS EXECUTIVE VICE president of Sun’s software group, Jonathan Schwartz heads the company’s new unified software business and is leading the charge to promote the Linux open-source technology. Schwartz met with InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor and Technical Director Tom Yager to discuss Sun’s recently announced Linux desktop strategy and to explain how it’s in the industry’s best interests to develop an alternative to arch-rival Microsoft.

InfoWorld: Can you bring us up to speed on where Sun is, particularly with your Linux desktop announcements?

What we announced [at the SunNetwork conference] is a server running portal, messaging, directory, identity, and Solaris — or Solaris X86 or Linux. And it’s free. That’s part of what we announced. [For] the first hundred users, all the software we’re talking about is free. On the client side [there is] Linux, Mozilla, Gnome, Evolution for e-mail, and a Java Card reader in a secure PC that’s OEMed from one of six Asian suppliers. By the first quarter of next year we expect to have customer-ready systems, which at Sun means you get a crate and in the crate are all the systems. You take them out, plug them in, turn them on, everything works.

InfoWorld: So you agree that the browser is not dead?

Schwartz: No way. If you look at what the .Net framework is, Microsoft goes around and says, “The submit button is a very inefficient mechanism for interacting with the user. You should really use the .Net framework.” There’s only one bug in that system: As soon as you at InfoWorld use the .Net framework, all of a sudden InfoWorld is now available only on Windows. You can’t run it on a Linux desktop unless we go figure out a way to reverse-engineer the .Net framework.

InfoWorld: What’s the relationship between the low-cost Linux LX-50 server bundle you announced several weeks ago and this new desktop strategy?

Schwartz: The relationship is Sun ONE — it is the idea that you should write applications to Java and to Web service standards so that they can be re-purposed for any device attached to the network. If you want to do that on an LX50 running Linux, great. If you want to serve 1.5 million consumers, I have a hard time seeing how you’re going to do that on Linux. Comcast serves 1.5 million subscribers e-mail accounts on a cluster of Sun ONE messaging servers. Internally they run Exchange for I don’t even know how many employees on a vastly larger number of Exchange servers that cost them vastly more amounts of money and introduce vastly more amounts of security risks. So if you’re Comcast and you look at re-purposing one of those architectures for the other audience, which would you use? You’d probably use the ones that run at scale. So what’s the nose under the tent for Sun? Why are the first 100 users free? Because the economic comparison we can drive at 100 users is absolutely stark. The economic comparison as soon as you get up to a million users is even more stark.

InfoWorld: For developers, isn’t there a disconnect between a server model based on Java and a client model based on Linux? Are you talking about them converging?

Schwartz: No. Nor am I talking about writing to C. People don’t do that anymore. Linux is an operating system, it’s not a developer platform. Linux is a tactic. Java is the strategy. The developer platform that we’re encouraging is for line of business applications, content-based applications, distributed applications. Java is the architecture. It runs on the highest end carrier-grade servers and it runs on the military-grade, most secure smart card microprocessor platform on the planet.

InfoWorld: But how’s that going to play on the Linux desktop?

Schwartz: We will integrate Java Card into the J2SE platform. The one bug in the system right now is that for the most part, the Java platform and the Web content worlds have diverged. It’s incumbent upon us in a Web services way to cause them to converge.

InfoWorld: Isn’t this reminiscent of a speech Bill Gates gave years ago at a Microsoft Professional Developers Conference about bridging the gulf between Win32 and the browser?

Schwartz: We run J2ME on all the smart card platforms. Java runs on all the set-top boxes. Ninety-five percent of all microprocessor smart cards are Java Card. It runs [on] Amex, Citi Group, Providian, the United States Department of Defense, and the whole country of Taiwan. So I’ve got a lot of momentum right now, unlike what Bill Gates was doing, which was [to say that] I have to give up something to get there. What I do is I add something in. I get more security, I get more interactivity, I get more authentication. What’s interesting to me is the desktop PC is the only unauthenticated network access point left. Everything else is associated with something. Your set-top box is identified and authenticated. I just got a dish box; you pop open the front and there’s a little conditional access card in there. My automobile has a key. My phone has a power button and a phone number associated with me. My PC? I can walk up to any PC anywhere and go send a virus around. Well, in the Defense Department you can’t do that anymore because [the PC is] associated with you.

A big part of the initiative for us is the integration of Java Card. We’re not just going to necessarily march off and say, “Good luck with this open-source software.” Our [initiative] is going to be rooted in a secure PC, because that security mechanism is going to become a critical differentiator. The cost is going to be a big part of it, but that’s a tactic. The strategy is: Let’s authenticate the last portion of authenticated systems, as well as add into our lineup of clients the one that’s been a little difficult to get, because the host has been a little recalcitrant.

InfoWorld: Is there an analogy on the client side to the Control Station controller box on the server side?

Schwartz: Absolutely. There will be two versions of these clients. One is called Sun Ray, which is a solid-state client. If you unplug [it] from the wall, it’s a piece of plastic, it’s useless. So the FBI no longer has a problem of worrying about people taking their computers home with them. You can’t take this one home with you. The user management there allows us to just dramatically reduce the number of system administrators associated with managing desktops. Managing a Unix network of desktops is much, much easier than managing a Windows network of desktops, which is why in general the comparisons are 1:500 [for] Unix and 1:100 [for] Windows.

Comcast has to manage 1.5 million consumers. For me to manage 100 users is very, very simple. I already do it today on Sun Rays, and I already do it for Messaging and Directory and Portal, and all the other things that’ll run on a desktop. So we will use the distributed user management system that’s already available in Sun Ray for these Linux desktops. It’s not very complex. If you look at how a Linux desktop is configured, there’s a little configuration file that tells you what’s available, when, for whom, what documents are open, where the windows are. That’s all just balled up and we’re going to hopefully get that on a little smart card, so as you walk from Linux PC to Linux PC, you’ll be able to take [that information] with you. We can also do things in a Linux desktop environment that are really, really difficult to do in a Windows world. For example, you can’t use Visual Basic. You can’t add any file to your desktop. You cannot access your local drive. There’s a bunch of things that we can do that are relatively difficult to do.

InfoWorld: What about heterogeneous environments of desktop clients?

Schwartz: All of this stuff needs to run compatibly with Windows, which is why Star Office is there, which is why Evolution is there, and why Mozilla is there. How do we cooperate on the networking side? We do what we do today, which is provide PC NFS and support for interoperability between Unix and Windows environments. [Consider] the security hassles alone — there’s a great statistic in The New York Times, I think it was [John] Markoff who said this, that a security patch in the Microsoft environment in a thousand-server enterprise cost $300,000. OK, there have been 60 patches this year. That’s a lot of money. My belief is we can eliminate almost all of that.

InfoWorld: What happens if this works and, instead of dealing with Gates, we’re dealing with you? What’s the difference?

Schwartz: All the software — all the principal elements of the software — are open source. So if you want to take Mozilla and Evolution and Linux, [if] you want to do another desktop, have at it.

InfoWorld: What if HP wants to do that?

Schwartz: You have no idea how opportune that question is. Wouldn’t that be interesting? The issue is — and I don’t mean to be evasive — it’s just that we have discussions with all of the major PC OEMs going on right now because they all want to talk to us. The thing that’s a little weird is we have nothing to lose. This requires no real incremental investment and we’re going to polish this up and make this much easier to deploy and manage. Managing a 1.5-million-user installation is very different than managing 100 students, so we’re going to go polish that together, levering control stations, some of the provisioning technologies.

We don’t have a relationship with Microsoft, to worry about eroding our PC margins. If this succeeds, our margins will rise because more people will want our portal, directory, messaging, calendaring, and identity services. If this succeeds, we will ship more storage to contain all the mail messages, pictures, what have you that are in that application. If this succeeds, the odds are good that it won’t just be a 100-user high school, it’ll be a 5,000-user call center for a financial services customer who has retail call centers dealing with credit cards. And those 5,000 users banging on a server probably ain’t gonna do with just the little tiny one we put in the 100-user pack. They’re probably going to need a V880. Or they’re going to probably need to migrate to larger storage. They’re going to need to look at a data warehouse. It gets us engaged in the dialogue with CIOs across the planet to hit on really the three central issues that I hear: “Save me money, increase my level of security, and please help me consolidate away all of this ridiculous complexity.” I was with a CIO of a large bank on the East Coast who told me they had one server for every 4-1/2 employees. Think about that. What does he care about? “Please reduce the diversity of what I’ve got.”

InfoWorld: Are you talking about freeing people from subscription-based software plans, where you never finish paying for what you buy?

Schwartz: No. That phone that’s probably in your conference room cost about 300 bucks and you pay 300 bucks a year to maintain it. That’s a huge amount of money for what is basically a phone that cost about 10 bucks to build. On the one hand, everybody’s very uncomfortable about buying a PC or a desktop or a server that way, but we’re all very comfortable buying phones that way. I think there is a utility to subscription-based pricing, which is when you don’t want it anymore, you can stop. I have a subscription-based pricing on my cell phone. I still pay for my cell phone; it doesn’t mean the purchase price goes away.

The only real issue I have with software assurance is the terms and conditions under which the users were expected to migrate, which are: You sign up or we’re going to screw you to the wall. And secondly, the fact that [users] had no negotiating power because there was no choice. They couldn’t really run to a Mac. I wish they could have. I love OS10. As I said, my wife will never, on God’s green earth, migrate off. So [at Sun] we will likely have a subscription model for those customers that want it that way. We will also likely have a full purchase price. I was with the CIO of a satellite broadcast company who told me his average cost was between 600 and 700 bucks per user, per year, on software alone. And he’s running a call center. I said, “I guarantee you, no matter what, we can come in under that.” Now you may not have exactly the same [apps] as you have currently, because Star Office isn’t exactly Microsoft Excel, and Gnome isn’t exactly Win XP, and Evolution isn’t exactly Outlook, and Mozilla isn’t exactly IE. But I’m not sure your call center employees need [those].

InfoWorld: Is your goal simply to reduce Microsoft’s margin to the point where they have to back off?

Schwartz: I used to be Sun’s Chief Strategy Officer, and the one thing that became evident after two years of doing that job is that strategy is by far the process of picking what you’re not going to do. It’s not the process of picking what you’re going to do. So I’ll tell you the things we’re not going to do. I don’t want this on Amazon. I don’t want to have a consumer product. I don’t want to piss off Yahoo because we didn’t pick their home page as the home page on our browser. Or an infrastructure company, we ship systems. Would I love to see Yahoo and Sprint and Comcast and AOL Time-Warner private label these products out into their value chains? Absolutely. Am I going to go fight over what icon they can put on the desktop or tell them if they take off Mozilla and put on Netscape, we’re not going to give it to them? Absolutely not.

InfoWorld: How long are you going to give away the razor?

Schwartz: Well sure, my royalty on this little smart card is, I think, about a penny. There are going to be billions of these in the world. That’s not big money to Sun, sadly. But what I know is that this is an open specification that I can supply systems for on the back end. And we’re going to compete like cats and dogs to get that revenue. Are we going to ever be able to lock this thing into a directory running on a Sun server? No. But we’re going to execute like mad to make sure it’s the easiest thing to go do. Are we ever going to be in a position to monopolize what’s on the back end of an open-source desktop? Absolutely not. But at least it’s there. Now is an opportune moment, but there is a little window of time here to take all that’s good and great about the open-source movement, all of the frustration about what Microsoft is doing, and say, “Look, let’s just identify another open desktop.”

I was on a CSFB [Credit Suisse/First Boston] panel with the VP from Groove [representing .Net]. And it was really interesting, because CSFB, in all their wisdom, was trying to set up the .Net vs. Java argument. The host — who was a CSFB banker — was basically trying to cause a fight to happen. And I said “You know, Mr. IT guy from CSFB, how do you feel about the linkages between the products you buy from Microsoft and the other products and the fact that they’re getting locked in?” He says, “We don’t do that anymore. That’s why we’re not going to run those through .Net.” I said, “OK, point proven. Let me come back again: You, the guy from Groove, why do you write to the Windows platform?” And he said, “Look, it’s a volume platform. It’s got great technology.” OK, but if there were another platform that had two million users, he’d say, “Oh God, we’d ship in five minutes.” So my point is, you’re not loyal to .Net, you’re loyal to volume. So it’s in all of our best interests to go create a volume platform.