Home Podcast Interview with Sun’s Tim Bray and Radia Perlman

Podcast Interview with Sun’s Tim Bray and Radia Perlman

Last night I published the first part of
my interview with two senior Sun Microsystems engineers, Tim Bray (Director of
Web Technologies) and Radia
Perlman
(Distinguished Engineer). The interview was to celebrate the 15th birthday of the Web this week.

Several commenters on the Slashdot thread about
my post said they’d prefer to get the whole context, rather than just my write-up of
it. So here now is the full interview as a podcast
[37 minutes, 17MB]. The audio quality is not great at the start (due to a bad telephone
connection), but it gets better after a couple of minutes. Note that this is instead of me doing a separate write-up of Part 2.


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Subjects discussed

Some of the subjects discussed in the full interview podcast are:

  • The past and future of the Web – and where Sun fits into the picture.
  • Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and why Tim and Radia don’t think it will be a major driver
    on the Web.
  • Web-connected devices (music players, TV, games machines, etc) and the
    future of the browser.
  • Web Office – do Tim and Radia think a browser-based office suite will ever be
    competitive with MS Office? Sun has StarOffice, which is a desktop alternative to MS
    Office. Will it go web-based?
  • How does Sun fit into the Web 2.0 era we’re currently in – e.g. social
    software, apps that leverage collective intelligence.
  • How will RSS and ATOM be used going forward; and thoughts on Google’s data
    format GData.
  • Security on the Web
  • Where will the Web be at in another 15 years?!

Key Quotes from Part 2

Some key quotes not featured in Part 1:

  • Tim on media on the Web: “I do not expect the Internet to be a suitable medium for
    broadcast video, at any kind of acceptable level of quality that we’ve come to expect on
    our TV screen, any time soon. The architecture isn’t built to do that and the bandwidth
    isn’t there.”
  • Tim on Web Office: “Anything that can migrate onto the Web absolutely will.”
  • Radia on security on the Web and stopping the bad guys: “People ought to be trying to
    make it easy and cheap, rather than trying to make money out of security.”

Hope you enjoy the podcast. I plan to interview more Web industry luminaries over the
next few months.

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