Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Launching "KR Inc.!" in Bangalore
Clients:
International Business Machine
Hewlett Packard
Nokia Seimens Network
Bank Of America
ACS | CTS
Our Objective:
To train the best of the source to the Industry inform of intellect & product
Channel the proper resource to deliver the best of the Support & Services.
To reach the core companies e.g. technology, education, choreography, management, quality etc with best of the brains.
Contact : Raju Singh / Kajal Mehta | Mobile : +91 99864 10802 | Email : singh.raju@hotmail.com
Friday, January 1, 2010
Five years of Google blogging
What captured your attention this year? Here are the top 10 posts of 2009, by unique pageviews:
- Introducing the Google Chrome OS - 2,591,794 unique pageviews (more than 12 percent of the year's total). The announcement of our open source operating system received more than 4x the views of any other post.
- Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave - 639,225. Wave-mania struck after we introduced a new product for collaboration and communication at our Google I/O conference.
- Here comes Google Voice - 357,084. We released a preview of this application to help you better manage your voice communications.
- 'This site may harm your computer' on every search result?!?! - 320,435. A short-lived error affecting Google search results led to confusion and concern; this post cleared it up.
- Email in Indian languages - 224,052. A transliteration feature in Gmail that makes it easier to type in Indian languages was a hit. More than one million readers of the blog in 2009 were from India — a 53 percent increase over 2008.
- Releasing the Chromium OS open source project - 217,424. A few months after announcing our operating system project, we open-sourced it as Chromium OS.
- Now you see it, now you don't - 165,329. We introduced a new, clean version of our classic homepage.
- Google Apps is out of beta (yes, really) - 164,319. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk all lost their beta tags (in Gmail's case, after five years!).
- Now S-U-P-E-R-sized! - 155,196. A 'small' change increasing the size of the Google search box got a lot of attention.
- Introducing Google Public DNS - 143,122. We launched our public DNS resolver, which converts domain names into unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers.
As always, we had some fun in 2009, with grass-mowing goats and a panda-obsessed Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) on April Fools' Day. Our curiosity was piqued by Atlantis (or not) under the sea, constellations in Google Sky Map and a fresnel lens somewhere in between.
Finally, the Google Blog network continues to grow. This year, we welcomed blogs dedicated to Google Wave, Google New Zealand, Data Liberation, Google Voice, Google Arabia, Google Thailand, European Public Policy and Google Chrome — among others — to our blogging family.
Beyond the blogs, in February we jumped head-first into the Twitterverse, starting our @google account with a geeky tweet. Since then, we've tweeted more than 1,000 times, and are grateful to have gathered two million or so followers. That puts us in the company of @algore and @ashsimpsonwentz, and (today, at least) just 65,000 or so followers behind a certain @ladygaga (although we're pretty sure that gap is only going to grow — no way we can compete with her outfits). Around 75 other Google entities and teams have gotten into the Twitter act this year as well, so we built a directory to help you keep up with all the action. Twitter also was our biggest non-Google referrer to the blog in 2009, a clear sign of its rapid growth in popularity.
Thanks for sticking with us through all of our goings-on over the past 12 months. We look forward to having you back for more in 2010. In the meantime, happy New Year!
Posted by Emily Wood and Jordan Newman, Editors, Google Blog Team
Final Draft of Cloud Computing Use Cases White Paper available for comments
( [link] ). We welcome your comments on the paper and any
suggestions as to any errors or omissions. Comments can be posted thru
the dIscussion group at ( [link]
).
Look forward to your comments
"Financial Investment Company Elastically Scaling Storage Using a Public Storage Cloud
Security in the Cloud ([link]
use-cases ).
Description: A financial investment company is about to internally
announce a new investment products to its agents and affiliates. This
will involve include creation of several videos to explain the"
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Understanding Sun in Three Easy Steps (1 of 4)
We're approaching the end of our fiscal year, and given all the swirl in the economy, I thought it worthwhile to restate where Sun's headed as a company, to let customers, partners, employees and investors see and understand where we're headed. Clarity's always useful, doubly so in times of uncertainty.
Let me start by joining the chorus of those worried about the global economy. I am routinely talking to customers now partially owned by governments, whose share prices have declined 95% or more, whose balance sheets and basic business models are under extraordinary duress. Like every business, our health is a derivative of our customers', and to that end, we've got our challenges - sure, innovation loves a crisis, but only after customers have stepped out from under their desks.
The glass isn't only half empty. I'm also seeing customers who've never had it better, from media startups and telecommunications firms, to government agencies flush with new funding - but they're certainly a cheerful minority.
Sun is privileged to have an exceptionally strong balance sheet, over $3 billion in cash, and a nearly two decade history of generating positive cash flow. We've also got a set of technologies and people that continue to play an ever more vital role in the economy. Sun's products help companies grow and help them consolidate, and they help governments stimulate the economy, as well. From building bridges to automating health care, government stimulus will undoubtedly drive technology investment, and we're well positioned to participate globally.
Which is all to say, I'm neither worried about the role information technology will play in the economy, nor am I worried about the relevance of Sun's offerings. I'm not worried about the future, I'm focused on its arrival date.
So I'm going to divide my comments on Sun's future into three or four blog entries, of which this is the first. You're going to see an accelerating series of announcements over the coming year, from amplifying our open source storage offerings, to building out an equivalent portfolio of products in the networking space; from the addition of new and potentially surprising Solaris and MySQL OEM's, to our newest cloud offerings and startup programs. I want to put all this in context, to be as clear as possible about our priorities and market approach, and help everyone understand both the parts and the sum of the parts.
Let's get on with it.
In my view, we have a very simple business - when I talk about Sun, I talk about us needing to do 'only three things.'
1. Recruit every developer on earth to use our software or services.
This is a strategic activity, not a financial one, so don't look for revenue here. I'll devote an entire entry to understanding the motivations and mechanisms driving technology adoption, and to discussing the varied audiences we target. As the head of developer technologies from a very large customer said to me last week over dinner, 'I haven't visited Sun in five years, but all of a sudden you seem to matter to my developers.' I'll help parse that statement in my next entry.
2. Deliver the world's most compelling commercial offerings - focused primarily, but not exclusively, on deployers of the technologies whose adoption we're driving.
Our software and service products target those that find free to be a more expensive alternative than commercially supported, for whom the cost of downtime exceeds the price of a commercial license. That's a small fraction of the planet, but it's a lucrative one. On the systems side of the house, our products reach across rack and blade servers, storage and networking systems - basically, everything to power the cloud.
I'll talk about the reliance this business has on developers to drive differentiation, and gross margin dollars, and the competitive advantage such reliance creates as we broaden our market offerings into storage and networking.
3. Execute the world's most effective selling/service connection between 1. and 2.
I spend a lot of time talking publicly about the first two points, and very little talking about this last one - in part, because it's been a work in progress, and because the scale of our sales/services channel has been one of our biggest strategic challenges.
But the ordering matters - our first financial priority is to generate free cash flow; our first strategic priority is to grow our available market. When they're in sync, as I believe we are in our Open Storage business right now, you have to beat us in the free software community and then again in front of paying customers. That's a tough combination, especially if you're a proprietary storage vendor that pretends to like free software, so long as it doesn't compete with your products.
As you know, simplicity takes a lot of engineering, so it's easy to say 'just three things,' but I'm not in any way suggesting these tasks are easily accomplished. But our intent is to create, promote, and commercialize the highest quality network innovations. Innovations that captivate developers, and deployers.
To understand Sun, you have to understand both, you have to see what drives our financial performance, as well as read our financial statements. Absent both perspectives, you'll miss the bigger picture, the bigger threat, or the bigger opportunity.
With this as a backdrop, you should expect me to focus on the points enumerated above in the next few blogs entries. Focusing on today's market, and - independent of the economic slowdown - on tomorrow's.
Thanks for reading.
(YouTube version of video here)
Technology Adoption (2 of 4)
1. Technology Adoption
2. Commercial Innovation
3. Efficiently Connecting 1. and 2.
This entry focuses on the first, Technology Adoption. Adoption is a non-economic phenomena, no money is spent, only time - yet it has extreme financial consequences. Let me give you an example.
I was with a big customer of ours last year, and reading through my account briefing before the meeting, I knew we were doing well. An analysis of their download activity showed they were heavy users of Solaris and OpenSolaris, and they had a large internal community of MySQL users, as well. In the meeting, their CIO said 'we love where Solaris is headed.' I then asked if we could help with MySQL, and he said... 'I banned it.'
Not exactly a buying signal.
I was stunned. I asked, 'why?' He responded, 'Oracle is our global standard, and with 20,000 developers, people need to follow the rules.' I said we had a very good relationship with Oracle, and started talking about how fast Oracle runs against our new Open Storage products.
Until he interrupted me, '...but my ban failed.' What? 'We hire lots of people out of college every year, and they all come in knowing MySQL. All my prototypes are written to MySQL, and now I have a big base of MySQL apps I don't want to port, and a bunch of MySQL programmers I don't want to retrain. So I'd like a commercial relationship.'
In a nutshell, that's adoption in action. Change in IT isn't just a top down phenomenon - it's more often bottom up*.
Innovation vs. Reselling Innovation
What's the cost of missing that adoption? For Sun to resell a 1-way x86 server running Microsoft's Windows or Red Hat yields (at best) a 10% gross profit margin. Very few companies have the scale to survive on those margins. More to the point, when you resell someone else's products, your customer relationship isn't built with the CIO or technology directors, it's built with their reverse auction web site. For technology companies, the same applies to reselling any product you don't own - it's impossible to differentiate with anything more than a cheaper price. A price your supplier can, and will always, undercut.
Alternatively, when a user picks our products - when they build their storage on ZFS, their network on Crossbow, or their application on MySQL, independent of whether they've paid, they've created an opportunity for Sun - going forward, there's only upside. It's called positive option value.
Not to dip into finance 101, when the net present value of a lifetime revenue cycle exceeds the value of a one time purchase, a product or service that initiates the payment stream is either freely distributed (if it has no marginal cost, like software), or subsidized (if it has a hard cost). That's why you see so many free credit cards, free checking account, free mobile phones, free month's rent, free social networking, etc. In the technology world, free is the new black.
Free Markets
That's also why the internet's most valuable brands are *all* free - Amazon, Google, EBay, Skype, Yahoo!, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, Baidu, TenCent, etc. Those brands reach more and have greater affinity than just about any other consumer brands. And in the technology marketplace, Linux, Java, MySQL, Firefox, Apache, Eclipse, NetBeans, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris, the same applies - free is a universal price, requires no currency translation, and reaches the longest tail of the market.
Now, could Amazon charge you to shop? Could your bank charge you to open an account? Google charge you to search? Could Sun charge people to download MySQL or OpenOffice.org? Sure, we could also destroy those brands in a matter of days. If you're not free, by definition you miss serving those that can't afford, or aren't ready to pay - which means your audience is capped, or destroyed if your competition is already free.
Microsoft's the only company I didn't include in the above list - and although I consider them a stupendously great brand, they're the only company that can really approximate free while making money on the distribution of their products. The fact is they're bundled on almost every PC across the planet, and appear 'free' to the users who use those PC's - they've amassed immense power with their distribution, and few users believe they're paying for Windows when they buy a personal computer.
Thus, to developers (Sun's target market) with Windows PC's, Microsoft's product are, in effect, already free. (As an aside, notice Microsoft inexorably moving toward free distribution, too, to reach new users - at some point, you can't bundle every product on every computer, it'd be like printing a Sunday edition of the newspaper every day of the week).
This is exactly why we freely distribute our key software assets all over the world - if we didn't, users and developers might pick someone else's free product (or simply use the one they assume to be free). And if they picked someone else's product on which to build their business or their application, Sun becomes a reseller - which isn't our mission or business model. It's a free market, in every sense.
The customer I referenced in my first entry
that said, 'I haven't visited Sun in five years, but all of a sudden you seem to matter to my developers' was saying he was seeing exactly that, a lot more of our products used by his developers - from VirtualBox to MySQL, Glassfish to ZFS. For some users, and nearly all developers, budgets aren't measured in dollars, they're measured in time and attention - if you want those audiences to spend their time and attention with you, you have to earn it. If you earn it, a preference forms. For Sun, we drive that preference over our competition, primarily proprietary alternatives.
Our Products are Our Ads
Now, the words 'driving preference' are used by the advertising industry when talking about branding. Businesses brand or advertise to drive awareness of or preference for their products. In the case of a Nike or Toyota, both have to spend fortunes to 'buy media,' or acquire the ad space (or airtime) through which they'll present, free of charge to consumers, the images or content they feel best represents their brands.
Why doesn't Facebook advertise? Because Facebook itself is a branding experience. Using Facebook drives preference for Facebook. And their audience, in users, outreaches just about every media company on earth. It would make no sense for them to buy media, they are media.
For the audiences Sun cares about, those building, deploying or buying technology, we've got a similar reach. By being freely distributed, our products build their own audiences. And using the products, from Glassfish to ZFS or NetBeans, creates a branding experience (and a wildly positive one, if we're doing our jobs well). So why don't we advertise in traditional outlets? Well, every day, the number of people using our products, getting that positive branding experience, eclipses nearly all major newspapers globally, combined.
By proliferating Sun innovations, even encouraging derivatives that will never drive revenue to Sun, we are creating preference for open source, awareness of Sun as an innovator, and displacing proprietary vendors that can't build comparable audiences. That preference has value to us, and to the broader communities in which we participate. The value spans awareness, market penetration, skills development, ecosystem expansion - a healthy community is a growing community.
How else is adoption or preference valuable? Volume adoption attracts application developers, and can drive tipping effects - once one independent software vendor, or ISV, picks your platform, others that work with that ISV follow suit. If you do a good job, you lead an avalanche of ISV's to pick your platform - which makes it more appealing to end users. That's why Red Hat has such a durable Linux model - once Oracle picked Red Hat as the Linux to which they'd first certify Oracle's database, the ISV's that relied on Oracle certified only to Red Hat, which tipped the market to Red Hat so strongly that not even Oracle has been able to undo that grip.
So adoption drives the ecosystem, which drives more adoption and more expansion... you get the idea. It's a virtuous cycle, a cycle that starts with volume adoption.
What Adoption Looks Like
So what does 'Adoption' look like? Here's a picture, which shows the ramp we're seeing from free software adoption across the world for some of our key datacenter assets.
For competitive reasons, I won't specify which products are shown, but suffice it to say we're very happy with the ramp, and we love great product reviews - that's what drives the spikes. The troughs are weekends. Bear in mind these are datacenter assets (like Glassfish and OpenSolaris), not consumer runtimes (like Java or OpenOffice.org), so these downloads influence datacenter design. Every day, our software is working hard to drive preference in startups, in government agencies, dorm rooms, ISV's, fortune 100 IT shops, everywhere the internet reaches. Free products reach everyone interested in them, no barriers.
On the consumer side, OpenOffice.org, which certainly promotes Sun's vision of open standards and data formats, reaches nearly three million new users - every week. Adding them to a user base we estimate to be between 150 and 200 million users. Talk about global circulation.
Our products are our brands and one of our most effective means of driving design wins - in front of users, developers and OEM's. In markets as diverse as high performance computing and grid scheduling, web databases, application infrastructure and desktop virtualization. Free distribution and access to source code is our investment in the global developer community. We invest with our code, our ideas and time, and we promote and encourage derivatives. We gain by reaching people we'd otherwise never reach - and earning their attention and engagement. Even if we're never paid, that's positive option value.
Another way of looking at adoption are these 'pink dot' maps - they show us where our products are gaining users via opt-in registration. My favorite dots on the map shown are in places we clearly have no sales coverage - I'd like to say hello to our users on the Falkland Islands, thank you for choosing Solaris :)
What's the value of all that adoption? Like the value of search, shopping, or opening a bank account, there's no instantaneous value beyond the fact you've chosen to invest your time and energy in our ecosystem, and not our competition's. At global scale, that makes us an enormously tough competitor for proprietary companies, or those without true innovation. For example, to get a sense for what our proprietary storage competitors are facing everywhere around the globe, Google the phrase, 'love ZFS'.
But as with all free business models, the real value arises in what comes after free - and that's my teaser to get you to read the next blog entry, focused on our Commercial Innovations.
Thanks, again, for reading, watching and commenting.
---------------------------------
* as I often say to groups of CIO's, 'which one of you gave permission to your employees to search on Google?' No one ever raises their hand :)
And to my readers/viewers for whom English isn't your first language... I'm doing my best to talk more slowly. I will redouble those efforts in the next video... thank you for watching!
Sun's Network Innovations (3 of 4)
1. Technology Adoption
2. Commercial Innovation
3. Efficiently Connecting 1. and 2.
This entry focuses on the second, Commercial Innovation, and reviews our core revenue products, services and strategies.
By now, you understand Sun's approach to growing the market - driving adoption of key technologies drives Sun's addressable market. Once you're using one of our fundamental technologies, Sun's innovations focused on those technologies are relevant to you. The beauty of free distribution is you don't have to pick customers, they pick you.
Three very valuable markets emerge from this adoption. I'll focus on the first two here, the products and services we sell.
The first market is obvious. Software isn't downloaded onto air.
Systems Innovations
There's always some system platform underneath software - sure, it might be a laptop in a dorm room*, but it's just as likely to be into a Fortune 500 company, attached to servers, storage and networking equipment. All told, this datacenter systems market is more than $150b annually.
And in this datacenter market we build exceptional systems - screaming fast entry level servers, all the way up to the most efficient mainframe class systems. We build super fast storage, from our new flash based platforms to eco-efficient tape and archive solutions. We also build the world's fastest networking switches, powering the planet's largest supercomputers. We cover the entire spectrum, and work with the smartest partners in the industry to serve customers across the globe. Although we focus on our own technologies, like Java, MySQL and Lustre, we also optimize for VMware, Microsoft's Windows and we're generally recognized to run Oracle better than anyone on the planet.
Now, you heard me call these our Systems products, not just hardware products. These systems are obviously more than just naked components, they're engineered with remote management and monitoring, component redundancy, integrated virtualization, and on board storage and networking. That's why our margins are higher than the industry's***. I'm very proud of our Systems team, they are the most talented platform engineers on earth, and they earn consistently stellar reviews.
But where's this first market headed? Here's where it's going to get interesting.
Datacenter Systems Convergence - Who Plays? Wins?
As I've said before, general purpose microprocessors and operating systems are now fast enough to eliminate the need for special purpose devices. That means you can build a router out of a server - notice you cannot build a server out of a router, try as hard as you like. The same applies to storage devices.
To demonstrate this point, we now build our entire line of storage systems from general purpose server parts, including Solaris and ZFS, our open source file system. This allows us to innovate in software, where others have to build custom silicon or add cost. We are planning a similar line of networking platforms, based around the silicon and software you can already find in our portfolio.
At the heart of this convergence is Solaris - enabled by technologies such as ZFS (around which we're building our entire storage line), and Crossbow (around which you'll see us build some very compelling networking products). Technologists interested in ZFS and Crossbow can visit OpenSolaris.org, or request an OpenSolaris CD (click the CD image).
I've provided a picture here to make the point - these three industries (servers, storage and networking), are converging, driven by the raw performance of the underlying server operating system and microprocessor.
That means these adjacent markets are all open to Sun and the Solaris community. Leveraging inexpensive, general purpose components is one big advantage for us, but there are others - using a general purpose OS allows us to easily embrace specialized components (from flash memory to GPU's), or adapt to new storage or networking protocols entirely in software. The underlying OS and server are so fast, these extensions and enhancements are simple feature updates, and ones we can leverage across servers, and storage and networking.
This isn't to say the networking or storage companies don't have their own operating systems. They do, but in both instances, they're proprietary, have tiny volumes, and despite paying lip service to open standards and the Linux community, their core operating software is unavailable to developers, it's truly proprietary. Their niche OS's also lack cross industry support, which is why our Solaris OEM agreements with IBM, Dell, Intel, Fujitsu and HP are so important to our end customers - they know they'll never be locked in. Today's storage and networking vendors remind me of the server vendors in the late 1990's - with expensive software bolted to expensive hardware. Ultimately forced open by innovation.
At Sun, open source isn't for servers. Open source is for datacenters.
Where's the Money?
Let's also look at the financial backdrop to this convergence. For these networking and storage vendors, entering the server market means suffering profit degradation - the server industry is vastly more competitive than the storage and networking marketplace.
On the other hand, as Sun grows into the storage and networking markets, we're thrilled with higher profit margins. We're unique among platform vendors in being able to deliver Servers, Storage, Networking and Virtualization on our own terms, very well integrated and at our own prices. How will we differentiate against our peers?
Simple. Integration, innovation, and as a result of building atop open source and commodity components, we are the low cost supplier. They, on the other hand, will be forced into all kinds of contorted partnerships and complex reselling arrangements. They may ship the boxes, but they won't control the platform software - or profit streams.
How is our Systems business doing? The portions of this business sensitive to software adoption, primarily the low end of all these products, is doing quite well, growing double digits**. The weakness in our Systems business is really focused on the high end. This reflects really two things - the first is the deferrability of high end system purchases. Our high end business was up 20% a little over a year ago, it was down more than 20% in the December quarter of 2008 - across the industry, customers are holding off on big ticket purchases.
The second, and arguably more important headwind was a decision made back in the 1990's to cancel Solaris on Intel, in the belief it would protect Sun's SPARC hardware business. Conversely, that mistake destroyed a generation of Solaris developers, and accelerated the rise of alternatives to traditional SPARC hardware. And now you understand why we prioritize developers - they are the seeds from which great forests grow. If you don't water the roots, the trees wither.
But how do you make money giving software away to developers? Well, let's switch gears, and talk about Software and Services.
When Free is Too Expensive
One of my favorite customer stories relates to an American company that did nearly 30% of its yearly revenue on Christmas Day. They were a mobile phone company, whose handsets appeared under Christmas trees, opened en masse and provisioned on the internet within about a 48 hour period. When we won the bid to supply their datacenter, their CIO gave me the purchase order on the condition I gave him my home phone number. He said, 'If I have any issues on Christmas, I want you on the phone making sure every resource available is solving the problem.' I happily provided it (and then made sure I had my direct staff's home numbers). Christmas came and went, no problems at all.
A year later, he was issuing a purchase order to Sun for several of our software products. To have a little fun with him (and the Sun sales rep), I told him before he passed me the purchase order that the products were all open source, freely available for download.
He looked at me, then at his rep, and said 'What? Then why am I paying you a million dollars?' I responded, 'You can absolutely run it for free. You just can't call me on Christmas day, you'll be on your own.' He gave me the PO. At the scale he was running, the cost of downtime dwarfed the cost of the license and support.
Numerically, most developers and technology users have more time than money. Most readers of this blog are happy to run unsupported software, and we are very happy to supply it. For a far smaller population, the price of downtime radically exceeds the price of a license or support - for some, the cost of downtime is measured in millions per minute. If you're tracking packages or fleets of aircraft, running an emergency response network or a trading floor, you almost always have more money than time. And that's our business model, we offer utterly exceptional service, support and enterprise technologies to those that have more money than time. It's a good business.
All in/all up, our Software business is among the fastest growing businesses at Sun. I've attached our latest financial summary at the end of this blog. We span network identity (built with the OpenDS community), application infrastructure (biult with Glassfish and OpenESB), data management (built with MySQL, ZFS and Lustre), embedded software (such as Java, and the emerging JavaFX), alongside our core operating system and virtualization software (Solaris, OpenSolaris and VirtualBox). These open source platforms generate, alongside the services attached to them, over a billion dollars a year, making Sun by far and away the world's largest open source software company. (For those that continue to ask if we make money with Java, the answer is yes, it's on a ramp to hit about $250m this year - one of our best businesses - and that's just Java on consumer devices, excluding servers).
Every day, these products are being adopted globally, driving university curriculum, corporate trials and design wins, influencing skills, even supporting Presidential campaigns. We know not every download yields revenue or users, but they do yield awareness and trials - a small, but intensely valuable portion of which yields revenue and profit. Our sales reps see the purchase orders at the point of value, not at the point of download. The revenue's recognized over the period of the Service contract - a business model the rest of the industry, at least for mass market products, will inevitably adopt. Fighting free and open software, like fighting free news or free search, is like fighting gravity - and btw, gravity gets a lot stronger during economic downturns.
Conclusion
And in a nutshell, that's how we monetize adoption - with targeted, high value innovations.
We deliver the world's most effective and efficient Systems portfolio, spanning x86 and SPARC servers, storage and networking. And the world's most appealing Software and Services products, spanning embedded software to high performance file systems.
We call all these products network innovations. I know that defies industry categorization, but that's what innovation's all about, defying categorization.
I've only touched on two of the three opportunities opened by mass adoption. And with that as a teaser, I invite you to return for the final blog entry, talking about what might be the most valuable of them all - a market enabled by the innovations described above, and set to transform the entire marketplace. Embodying the phrase, The Network is the Computer.
See you then.
-----------------------
* and before you dismiss those users, some of the world's biggest internet companies/datacenters were started on laptops in dorm rooms... a trend I expect to accelerate.
** Sun's x86 systems business, for example, grew over 11% last quarter, when both HP and IBM's comparable businesses shrank in double digits. For those wondering 'how do you differentiate?', just ask our customers.
*** Compared to other industry standard server vendors.

