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Sramana Mitra wonders what Jonathan Schwartz is thinking after being elevated to the hot seat at Sun:

SUN, like Apple, has made its mark as a vertically integrated computer company with proprietary computer hardware and operating system. However, unlike Apple, the importance of the computer business has become questionable. The significance of the OS is questionable. The relevance of the chip business is definitely questionable.

To re-invent itself, Sramana avers that Schwartz ought to be looking for one product that Sun can use as its competitive advantage. In other words, the million-dollar question is “What is my equivalent of the iPod?”

Indeed. Is it Sun’s servers? Surely not in the hopelessly commoditized market, where “cheap eats better” is the norm. Is it SPARC? Nopes – Intel and AMD rule the roost here, and Sun, even under Scott McNealy, realized that, by releasing Solaris for the i386 architecture. Is it Solaris?

This is probably Sun’s best bet. Linux, although very popular, has nowhere the kind of brand that Sun has built up around Solaris 10. This is one area where Sun has gone about its marketing with a kind of holy zeal. And Sun has put in a lot into the OS – Dtrace, ZFS, Predictive self-healing, and Zones. Now is the time to decouple the Solaris brand from the rest of Sun’s hardware and make it an enterprise OS across vendors’ server lines.

Releasing Solaris to the Open Source community is also a very strong strategic move. If Scott McNealy is recognized as the father of the Open Systems revolution, then opening up Solaris must be his most significant achievement. It is upto Sun now to build as enthusiastic a community around Solaris as Linux has, and that is the challenge that faces top management at Sun. Blogs are one way of accomplishing this – getting the most out of Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, Eric Schrock, Mike Shapiro, Alan Hargreaves, and even Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the original founders of Sun and still one of its most respected individuals. Get them to discuss their vision, their code, their problems online, solicit opinions from developers across the community. Sun’s engineers are its biggest PR officers – get them to attend and speak at Developer Conferences, host Solaris-specific equivalents of the Ottawa Linux Symposium, even participate in events like the OLS.

Sell the Solaris brand as a sort of a “premium Linux”. Adopt a more Cathedral-style approach to its development (as opposed to Linux’s bazaar-style), but always develop in the community, not inside hermetically-sealed labs inside of Sun. Those kind of days are over. Sramana answers the iPod question in a related way:

“What are SUN’s major assets? The brand, particularly the enterprise computing brand is perhaps the biggest at this point. But we are trying to leverage it in very traditional ways, mostly by selling servers and services around servers, while margins in that business keep shrinking. We need to get out of this commodity business, and find a related but non-commodity niche.”

I was reading a Fortune Magazine article on how Ray Ozzie is the vanguard of Microsoft’s new Internet Services strategy. It struck me that Microsoft realizes that we’re moving away from the desktop to the “webtop” paradigm, where your data resides in the “cloud” of the Internet, and that we’re moving towards fundamentally new services that leverage the power of the Web. In other words, MS seems to “get” the Internet of the future.

In fact, one of the tenets of the “new Web”, or Web 2.0, as it’s more popularly known, is that value is moving up the software stack, and that applications are now commodities; the real value lies in services that are offered via those applications. For instance, I’m writing this document on Writely, a sort of Wordpad-for-the-Web. Mind you, it isn’t an application in the traditional sense of the term, as much as it’s a service. In any case, the important thing here is that it doesn’t matter what browser application I’m using to access this document on Writely. I’m using Firefox, but I might as well have been using Internet Explorer. Or Opera. Or Safari. Or… well, you get the idea. The browser does not matter any more. It is a commodity. A lot of application “services” today run on the same principle. All of Google’s offerings: Search. Local. Maps. Gmail. Orkut. Blogger. Writely itself. Take a look at the hottest tech startups today. Flickr. del.icio.us. 37signals. YouTube. Digg. Bloglines. Spot the pattern? How you access the application services does not matter.

The browser is just the way we access the Internet today. What will matter is how we will access the Internet tomorrow. I’ve said this in the past, and I’ll say it again here. Google Desktop (GD) is the application to watch out for. The future will belong to what are known as Internet-connected widgets, or as MS calls them, Internet-connected components (ICC) . These will be used on desktops, mobile devices, and any other appliances that will be connected to the Web in the future. And GD is one application that uses these ICCs already. Almost every single plugin connects to the Internet to gather the data it needs. Or take a look at Konfabulator, deemed valuable enough to be bought by Yahoo!. These widgets are the future of how information and content on the Internet is going to be created and accessed. Taking it to the next level, imagine these widgets on your smartphone. Or in your TV/TiVo. Or in your car. That is the opportunity for ICCs.

So does MS need Internet Explorer?
The area we’ve talked about above is where MS’s future opportunities are. Ray Ozzie and his team have to find a business model to monetize this opportunity. That’ll require his deep technical insight. It’ll also require immense technical talent from within MS to build a programming model around the new Web. And here’s where I’m going to step in and make this assertion.

Microsoft should stop developing Internet Explorer.

Instead, it ought to concentrate on building the Internet into the very heart of the next Windows, whether it’s the successor to Windows Vista (for the desktop), or Windows Mobile (for mobile devices). Firefox is doing a better job than IE in every respect. It’s the better browser by far. Only Opera can come close to being as good. IE isn’t MS’s competitive advantage in the least, in many respects, it’s a liability. A wise move would be to cease development on the browser – any development on IE would be simply playing catch-up to Firefox and Opera. It makes no sense to compete in such a market when you’re better off building up tomorrow’s market. Microsoft needs to jump to (in the words of Guy Kawasaki) “the next curve”. Or in the words of John Sculley, “change the rules of the game”, as he did at the helm of Pepsi.

I sense that Windows Live is another mistake that the company’s making. Not the idea of web-enabled services – that’s fine by me. But the fact that Windows Live works best on IE and has problems with Firefox, Opera, Safari means that we’re going down the same path again – trying to “lock-in” users to their browser, when it doesn’t make sense – does the value lie in Windows Live application services, or does it lie in Internet Explorer? There’s no rationale in their policy right now, and it looks as if it’s degenerating into an ego issue – stop the spread of Firefox at any cost. If Ray Ozzie is to be believed through his “The Internet Services disruption ” memo, MS is now a services company, only with multiple product offerings. (As an aside, this model is precisely what Gates had alluded to in his book “Business @ The Speed Of Thought” more than half a decade ago. Talk about visionary!) So why is it competing in a senseless, hopelessly commoditized market which isn’t even a revenue source, where all it gets is bad publicity, and where its product offering is way behind competitors from a feature and ease-of-use point of view?

If Microsoft has the courage to back up its vision with action, it ought to include a copy of Firefox with Windows Vista, as the default browser. But the home page ought to be Windows Live. Hmm – now that’s a move that makes sense!

It’s expensive:
I use the Airtel GPRS service very heavily. Because in Pune, it’s unlimited (in terms of volume and time) as long as I pay Rs. 150 per month. I use it for checking email, catching up on blogs, and using it as a Bluetooth modem for my Thinkpad so I can dial into my corporate network. It’s cheap, I’m connected, and I’m happy.

However, I’ve learnt that almost all other GPRS plans (even Airtel in other locations) charge based on volume, typically a paisa per kilobyte. That works out to Rs. 10 per MB. And I think that’s prohibitively expensive, something like twice the average broadband tariffs. Besides, the speeds aren’t anywhere like broadband, in fact far closer to the dialup speeds circa 1998. In addition, the mobile phone doesn’t offer you the user interface that a PC can, so what would compel a user to sign up for a scheme like this?

This is the same problem that’s hampering the widespread adoption of broadband in India. I had referred to this once before , and I have personally seen plenty of families I know, who haven’t signed up for broadband because it’s “expensive”, or won’t fit into their exact usage pattern. The same is set to happen with the mobile date market in India.

We need to remember that the mobile phone is to India what the PC is to the United States – the most widely used medium for data access. There is a tremendous market for mobile data services. We need to stop thinking according to the scarcity mentality – that is, to try to extract the maximum revenue from a small market, and begin to take bold steps to expand the market. There is huge opportunity in the latter.

Best phone for the Indian Market?
Smartphones such as the Nokia 6600 are cheap today, and will be real cheap in the near future. I am of the firm opinion that it’s going to be this model that can be a game-changer as regards hardware. Once this piece reaches Rs. 5000, once there is a critial mass of people using it, mobile data usage will explode. This phone can do most things that a rich data experience needs – for connectivity, we need Bluetooth, USB – this phone has it. RealPlayer for videos, an MP3 player, FM radio (although I think this isn’t stereo output), decent amount of storage, document viewers, Java – the works. It even has a camera, but this is  exceptionally poor and isn’t any real use. But a little amount of tweaking can make this a dream phone. It could be the iPod of the masses, the Simputer of the masses, and the PC of the masses too.

Mobile Applications:
What kind of applications would people use? For one, we need a kickass web browser for the mobile phone platform. I’d expected the Open Source Community to put together a mobile Firefox for at least the Blackberry or an O2 or a Treo (since that would probably be easier – more computing power, more disk space, more memory) than a Nokia, but then Opera beat everyone to it with the Opera Mini. That simple application has the potential of being a total game-changer. It runs on any phone that can run Java apps – any phone! Also a similar Java-based, small footprint Instant Messaging application – something like Migg33. Another thing would be a service like iTunes. We have a Jurassic version of that with Airtel’s Easy Music service. But that requires you to walk into an Airtel outlet. What we need is true download-via-GPRS, just like iTunes. With more and more phones having lots of storage, a file management application that lets you use your phone as a portable drive would be real cool. Again, it needs to be Java-based so that the interface would be the same no matter what phone it was installed on.

So it’s clear that we have the building blocks in place. But for the market to really take off, it needs a big gamble from a player who’s willing to change the rules of the game by making sustained investments for some amount of time. That is what Reliance did in the early 2000s, and today it can afford a 40 paise per minute tarriff within the Reliance network. Right now I would think only Reliance and Bharti are in a position to make that kind of investment.

Here are the results of a search on the Indian Express’ website for the columnist Saubhik Chakrabarti. Google returns Results 1 to 7 of. errr, just 5. Umm..

Here’s a report on CNN Money, on the way Bill Gates deals with information. The article does provide a rare glimpse into Gates’ office, but you come away with the feeling that this kind of article ought to have appeared on a technology website, like ZDNet, maybe – and ought to have been more in-depth. Can someone out there do an interview with Gates on this specific topic – Personal Information Management?

There are multiple issues about today’s increasingly high-tech workstyle that come forth in this piece by Gates. I’m going to go through a few of them here:

Desktop v/s Laptop v/s Mobile:
Gates works on a desktop PC, using a massive display spread across 3 21″ LCD monitors. What struck me was not the awesome display (I have experienced the joy of working with a 21″ LCD display before I switched to a ThinkPad), but the fact that for a person who travels a lot, and works from multiple locations, he uses a PC! I’d think his chief workstation would be a laptop. I couldn’t imagine life without a laptop now – I am so used to being able to access my documents whether I’m at work, home, at a conference, or at a speaking engagement. Gates says that “when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It’s fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need.” Well, I want to know more about this synchronization solution he’s using. I’d find it pretty difficult to sync all of my stuff on my Thinkpad to a PC, or the other way round – there’s just too many different types of things.

What’s interesting is that there’s nothing in there about mobile tools. Does Gates not use any? After all, the mobile world is now high on MS’ agenda. I would think that a touch-screen mobile device would be ideal for his meetings. I was speaking to a CEO of a technology company a few months ago, and he described how people used to walk into meetings these days without a laptop, TabletPC, or even a notebook. Then they’d whip out their Nokia smartphone and a foldable Bluetooth keyboard from their pocket, and type away!

I would think that Gates, who’s always championed the idea of “eating your own dog food” (witness how they migrated to Windows Server 2003 across MS internally even before the actual product launch), would use one of those Palm Treos that now run Windows Mobile 5.0:

Desktop Search:
“Another digital tool that has had a big effect on my productivity is desktop search”. Windows Desktop Search is probably (I hope!) what he uses, and although I don’t find it as snappy as Google Desktop Search, I can imagine what a huge productivity enhancer it can be for Gates. No filing, no browsing. As I had said previously, I do not use the Windows Start Menu anymore. I simply type the name of the application I want to in the Google Desktop search window, and click on it from the results list. Way faster.

The challenge for Gates is now to make Search the new paradigm for managing personal and public document repositories.

The Paperless Office:
The paperless office is now pretty much a reality with most tech companies now – we at IBM have digitzed almost all of our internal processes. There are a few instances where transactions are performed online but need to be printed out for approval – those are being addressed as you read this post. But the overall statement is true – it’s been a long time since the average technologist used a paper and a pen.

In his book, Business @ the Speed of Thought, Gates has covered the Paperless Office over an entire chapter. He points out that the only paper forms that remain at MS are the ones that deal with the Government. I’m certain that the situation is more acute here in India, where there’s no sustained, pan-department, nation-wide drive to cut down on paper. (Recall the ubiquitious sarkaari “file”!) That is where the most innovative minds must focus.

Sharepoint and Wikis:
Gates talks about collaboration using Sharepoint: “…SharePoint, a tool that creates websites for collaboration on specific projects. These sites contain plans, schedules, discussion boards, and other information, and they can be created by just about anyone in the company with a couple of clicks.” We at IBM use Wikis extensively. I haven’t had a chance to look at and evaluate Sharepoint, but Wikis do the same job with aplomb. Wikis are very scalable – two people working on an idea can use a wiki just as well as a multi-site, enterprise-level software development team with a staff of over a hundred – and very usable – no knowledge of HTML needed.

So we’re finally moving away from moulding our collaboration practices to fit in with existing tools, to building tools that are more suitable for efficient collaboration. For years, teams used email as a form of communication between teams, cc’ing everyone on the team to make sure everyone had the entire context. This is hugely inefficient! Think of the immense duplication of information – text, context, attachments. And speaking of context, it’s extrememly difficult to follow the flow of information by looking at multiple emails bottom-up. Wikis solve these problems with one stroke. The only shortcoming of a Wiki today is that representing tabular data is a bit of a pain.

Finally…
Finally, Gates talks about the “digital whiteboard” in a few MS offices, which takes a snapshot of the board and all its contents as an image. Hmm. We at IBM simply whip out our mobile cameras and take a photograph of the whiteboard! This remninds me of the story of NASA spending a lot of money on developing a pen that would work in Zero-gravity conditions, only to find that the Russians were doing fine with a pencil