Silicon Valley Is An Innovation Dagger

Silicon Valley Is An Innovation Dagger: "

It was a routine trip back home from work one of these days. As soon as I boarded the bus the driver asked me: 'So, what do you think about Google's announcement regarding China? Will Yahoo follow the suit?'. The same bus driver had asked me about my views on NexusOne on the day it was announced. He even has a strong point of view on net neutrality. The other day the librarian showed me a Firefox plug-in that hides your identity from Google. Everyday it's a constant reminder of the demographics that we live in the Silicon Valley. It's an innovation dagger. One edge keeps people to stay on top of cutting edge technology and the other keeps them away from the vast majority of the users that don't live in the valley.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of being surrounded by the smartest of the smart people in the valley. However for entrepreneurs it is equally important to stay grounded in the reality. As cool as iPod was and iPhone is and iPad/iSlate will be it takes years for the products to cross the chasm and many products simply vanish. If you are designing a product in the valley please do me a favor - find your users outside the valley. They are the real people, the mass, that you should be designing for. It took Facebook 5 years to go from 5M users to 350M users and Foursquare is just the beginning of what's more to come. If you are in the valley building the next big thing, be real. Hangout with all the cool kids on the block but don't forget that you will have to cross the chasm and it won't be easy.

Tomorrow Apple is going to announce the tablet. When I take the bus tomorrow I will face the question from the driver: 'So, what do you think of the tablet?'. While I prepare my answer, check out this hilarious 'In The Valley' performance that resonates well with what we see and how we think.

"

Launching "KR Inc.!" in Bangalore

About "KR Inc.". KR Inc estd. 2005 is an entirely independent entity operating from major locations in India. We have been associated with the top notch IT companies for providing sourcing solution in ND/Pune/AHM/Kolkata. With the existing dymanic mark in IT and Non IT sourcing, we commit to provide the best brain in the industry.
Clients:
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ACS | CTS
Our Objective:
To train the best of the source to the Industry inform of intellect & product
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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

Five years of Google blogging

Five years of Google blogging: "It's time again for our annual wrap-up of blogging at Google. You may have noticed 2009 marked our fifth year here on the Official Google Blog — our first post was in April 2004 — and it was our busiest year yet. This is our 423rd post of 2009 — a 15 percent increase over last year. We're also pleased to note that a total of 14,493,472 readers stopped by this year, a 21 percent increase. You hail from all over: more than half of visitors are outside of the U.S. The other top countries are (in order) U.K., India, Canada, Germany and France.

What captured your attention this year? Here are the top 10 posts of 2009, by unique pageviews:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Here comes Google Voice - 357,084. We released a preview of this application to help you better manage your voice communications.
4. '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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Now you see it, now you don't - 165,329. We introduced a new, clean version of our classic homepage.
8. 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!).
9. 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.
10. Introducing Google Public DNS - 143,122. We launched our public DNS resolver, which converts domain names into unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers.

We also developed a few different series of posts this year: one on the power of measurement, for people who want to improve the performance of their websites; a weekly series focused on search; and another on the latest in the world of Google Apps.

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

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Final Draft of Cloud Computing Use Cases White Paper available for comments

Final Draft of Cloud Computing Use Cases White Paper available for comments: "The final draft of Version 2 of the white paper has been posted
( [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

Financial Investment Company Elastically Scaling Storage Using a Public Storage Cloud: "This post is from the Cloud Computing Use Cases discussion group on
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"

Understanding Sun in Three Easy Steps (1 of 4)

Understanding Sun in Three Easy Steps (1 of 4): "We've been making a fair number of announcements recently - on both the product and the partnering front. That's generated a lot of interest, and a fair number of questions. So I thought I'd take the opportunity to deliver this overview and the upcoming focused discussions on what makes Sun tick in a video format. Let me know if this is useful, or what else we can do to keep you informed via the comment field at the bottom.

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)

Technology Adoption (2 of 4): "As I referenced in my prior entry, I'm reviewing Sun's three major strategic imperatives, and our progress going in to next fiscal year. Our strategic imperatives, in order, are:

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.

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* 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!

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