Sun Microsystems is a company that doesn’t get anywhere
near as much attention in the techmeme world as
Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. Which is kind of odd for a company whose motto seems highly
relevant to this era of the Web – “The Network Is The Computer”.
I was listening to a podcast that Tim
O’Reilly did with
Business 2.0 the other day and, even though Tim is now acknowledging that the ‘web
2.0’ term is “a very broad umbrella” (which has been my point over the past 6 months or
so), he still essentially says it’s about being in a “much more fully networked world”.
Which brings me back to Sun – they’re all about networks and increasingly about the
integration between the desktop and the Web, a topic which I’m becoming more and more
interested in. Plus James Governor has
been clueing me up to what Sun is doing these days, which helps too!
Sun’s latest stated vision is “everyone and everything
participating on the network” and they talk about the “Participation Age” on their About page. With new CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Sun does seem to be opening
up more. Jonathan
Schwartz wrote in his latest blog entry about an upcoming new initiative that seems
very 2.0 (or chmod 777 if you prefer):
“…you’ll see something very interesting next week start to appear
on Sun’s web pages and throughout our on-line store. You’ll start to see product reviews
written by users. You’ll see user defined ratings, right on our products. Just
like book or product reviews at Amazon. We’re starting with just a few products, but
it’ll ultimately extend all the way up to our highest end enterprise
offerings.”
As well as attracting users, this will probably also have the effect of stirring up
interest with bloggers. Which will result in Sun coming back into the light and getting
more attention (yes, the Sun/light witticisms will be plentiful too!).
From another angle, James Governor noted in a
recent blog entry that Sun has been somewhat isolated in recent years in terms of
‘coopetition’:
“Most other industry players have long responded to coopetition, both competing and
cooperating with other major firms, and changed their business models accordingly.
Sun on the other hand often looked somewhat isolated. Vertically integrated yes, but
isolated also.
It seems like Sun is now finally making that transition.”
So this may be the dawning of a new era for Sun, where their rays of light reach out
and touch users – probably resulting in a warm reception.
Photo: podtech.net
