Sun Microsystems Founders Panel

[Music] e [Music] this is one of the Odyssey and Technology Series that are sponsored by Sun labs and I'd like us all now to give a round of applause to Sun labs for sponsoring this entire series and I'd like to bring up Glen who's director of sun labs and vice president of [Applause] Sun so this is our second year of supporting the Odyssey and in Technology Series and it's a real honor tonight to get to introduce tonight's speakers as a matter of fact I work for a couple of them so the cost of failure is quite high so I figured the best thing to do was be brief uh so and that coupled with the fact that this audience really or this set of folks don't really need an introduction uh I'll start with Andy beckim who we're lucky enough to have back at Sun uh Sun U is lucky to have Andy as our chief architecture and Senior VP of our Network systems group uh Bill Joy was Chief scientist at Sun till uh 2003 and he's currently a partner at Kleiner Perkins callfield and buyers venod kosla is uh been with Kleiner Perkins callfield and buyers since 1986 the really the premier Venture Capital firm and of course Scott mcney our CEO who uh has a great quote that I just wanted to to kick the evening off with which is without Choice there is no competition without competition there is no innovation and without Innovation you are left with fill in the blanks so I'd like to introduce John Gage who's going to be moderating our panel tonight and thank you for coming thank you br thank you well for those of you that may we are a little in sequence well let's do it the bookins are technology and ex roommates and the center two are business and also ex- roommates so Andy venod Scott and Bill and John is is really he's like the fifth Beetle you never knew yeah when you see those pictures I was the one holding the camera that's always I thought I'd start out at the very end of the story in a way because now two of you are Venture capitalists and all of you pay a great deal of attention to where money goes to support Innovation where we're creating the new technology companies that might have that same meteoric path as Sun would you invest in sun today if someone walked up to you with a onepage or three page business plan I go through this all day long do I need would some would you invest in sun today and who did you have offering the business plan well you had a Stanford grad student you had the controller or auditor for Daisy CAD systems the you had the production manager for Onyx that made a little knockoff Unix box of some sort and you had a grad student at Berkeley and they had a three-page business plan would you fund people like this but you mean today 2006 or today 2006 yes today 2006 a little uneasy shifting here no uh no I I'll I'll I'll start with that I don't know if I'd meet Bill's standard since Bill's the wi capist now but the fact is the best plans are three or four pages long in fact the plan is classic in its part of a Harvard Business School case and I still think of it as one of the best plans because Andy made sure every spare word was removed from that plan it was a totally minimal plan we about a weekend to write the plan so the best ideas can be put down very succinctly and there's no reason a good business plan needs to be more than three or four pages if it's all me and no fluff but I think John de prom has you cannot separate the historical context from the investment decision so you really have to go back 1982 contct but you have to ask whether it was a good decision invest in 1982 and the answer is of course it was a good decision hindsight rewrites all history no mean I was actually invested in the company I took all my spare cash and put into the Sun and remember which of the Venture people told me isn't this a lot of risk you could be losing all your money I said I don't see any risk here well you were also the first poster boy for some the first John let me give you another example only a few years ago Andy essentially in kellia recreated a very similar plan different context different set of Technologies anybody I know would have invested in it in a minute if you saw the the the basic idea behind the plan I don't think any would have had any trouble funding that plan to that and uh without going into a lot of detail bill and I just funded another similar effort not comparative and not in the computer business but very similar sort of very short PowerPoint and the right people with the right clear concise ideas bill would you agree yeah I think um the first funding for sun was done very quickly right was it done in a parking lot or where was it done well I have a memory of the second round which uh the fifth the fifth founder who's here in the audience Von Pratt standing at a board at the tiny Sun office in Santa Clara with that New Zealand sheep jacket do you remember that the nubbly wool one that that V had and V was describing in detail which direction the sun technology would take everyone and John dur and Kleiner Perkins were all there and you guys were all n nervously hoping that vau would finish so that you could end up saying at the end of it this is why you need to fund us do you remember that meeting this was a uh the meeting when Kleiner Perkins visited say yes Andy I don't remember that exact Mee I remember another meeting where the the Venture people wanted to invest sort of ask us what we could be doing we just kept going on and on there was just so many good ideas and I then s of not they taking notes of what we were saying so I was getting worried that they would construe this as a commitment they were actually going to do all of these things but at the end they certainly did invest so actually what they were doing is they were taking those ideas and funding other startups well but John there's a comment I want to make to B bills comment about funding in the parking lot you know one of the great stories is we sort of got a commitment from Bob SackMan to fund us with seed money and sort of a very short meeting then we went out and uh sat in the parking lot and Scott says to me I don't know if I really want to do it so I had to take him to an upscale dinner at the McDonald's on page mail to convince him to stick with the plant do you remember that that's not how it went you said so when are you quitting your job and I said what are you talking about I'm making 40 Grand a year I ain't quitting you were working for Doug BRS at the time I working for Onyx systems yeah and he put money in when did you bring Doug broyal well I brought Doug in he had left onx and he was doing Venture at uh West Coast Venture and I introduced him to him that that afternoon and he looked in a half hour he watched this bouncing ball demo on this screen that had no it was not UL approved there were sparks flying there were wires connected to a a a multi-bus card cage with smoke coming out and a keyboard not packaged connected with copper wire and it ran Unix and just did a bouncing ball demo and Doug looked at it and said wow that's cool I'll invest like so that that night even know it took me to McDonald said when are you quitting you got to be kidding man I got a job I'm going to have kids someday I can't I can't quit and he said you can't back out on me now quote unquote I said you made me an offer he says you're a Founder I said oh okay so I went in and quit the next day and it was that quick I just thought what I think there's an important Point here never completely without doubt you know it's sort of you always have concerns and doubts and so those of you who are thinking about it you got to just jump in and do it you have doubts I didn't have any doubts right it was your Hardware that was sparking I've been working on stuff for 3 years before the company started so it was hard to make some of that stuff originally and timing problem for those of those of you who are techies uh the pins on the multibus connector had 16 amp current spikes what did you say to that I'm not here to remember that bill they were blue wire specials when you began so now we had before the company existed the three of you had been talking Stan Stanford University uh had the Stanford University Network Von Pratt was was your thesis adviser you were discussing whether or not companies that you at that moment were licensing the technology to that could make this perhaps you should form a company to do this and at some point the three of you made a trk to Berkeley to meet Bill could you describe what happened there so so before we got the bill so I had a previous company it was in this licensing business because I I thought of Hardware like software like you know open source just give it away and people pay your royalty and it actually did okay made like half a million dollars in a year and I thought that's not bad for starters but the problem was especially for a graduate student exactly all these companies licensing stuff didn't understand the market opportunity when they they had the license technology and they didn't know what to do with it and I I got really worried about this because there was obviously a window to this opportunity so vno called me up because he also wanted to license this thing I guess or he heard about the license operation and then very quickly the conclusion was we just started the company and then he called up Scott and then we needed the software founder co-founder and then we called a bill well no that didn't go we said we need somebody for for Unix so I went to my Onyx Unix buddies and we said who's the best Unix person you know we went through about 2 months of trying to find the world's best Unix gurus and we went we interviewed everybody and kissed a lot of toads in this process and finally we got to a really really smart guy was an absolute not the kind of person we wanted to have in the company and he said well the guy other than Richie and Thompson the the the son of Unix the god of Unix is Bill Joy and and he goes oh yeah I know Bill I'm like well so well what I knew about Bill was he was trying to finish Berkeley software distribution release so he thought he was busy we called Bill up and we said we want to come up and talk to you he says I'm not interested I'm Mak a lot of he says I get an offer he said an offer a month at the time and you were making a pretty big bag of money and then we said well Andy $41,000 $41,000 he was rich so uh he said Andy I'll send Andy up so we said all right we'll bring Andy up he says you don't need to come just send up so we all piled in the car we got in Van's Rattle Trap I don't remember what it was it was not it was unsafe at any speed whatever it was and we showed up when they were parking so V know and I walked into the and you had to see Bill Joy when he codes his fingers don't move and code is flying across it's like he's like one with the with the keyboard he looks up and we shake hands and we sit back down and he goes right back to the keyboard and he ignores it I asked him 8 years later I said what Veno and I are sitting there and you're just coding why didn't you like talk to us he said I was waiting for top management to show up So eventually Andy walks in and the two of them do this thing like this they get their hands on the floor we go to lunch bill Ven and I just watch have our we have a we have cut ribs or something and we went home and and that's how we got bill as the the fourth founder well there was a problem because the two of you at that point and you can see it downstairs in the poster looked like you were about 16 years old so when you would go talk to Senior Management about worked for us you went to see aded Xander once what did he do throw you out immediately or listen to you for a while uh immediately it took us six seven eight years to finally hire him you know um there's an interesting La story and a lesson in the Ed Xander story because I called him first the week he had quited dat General and agreed to join Apollo son's biggest competitor and I tried to pitch him the son's story in the world was so different uh he said to me the first thing I'm going to do when I get to Apollo is remove all references to any standard in their literature because they say it's a 68,000 processor and he wasn't willing to even acknowledge that so this sort of open system standards thing was sort of the most critiqued part of the sun business plan in those days every venture capitalist I talked to said but what's the proprietary Advantage uh there was a lot of critique of how you going to build something proprietary and I sort of remember Ed's first comment to me when I tried to explain to him our strategy so build pro proprietary meant make money somehow was the synonym well open open assistance was certainly not the accepted visdom at the time well when Andy when these guys showed up at Berkeley I had a room with six vax 750s it looked like a computer center but they were actually my machines okay okay and I don't think these computers and I'd heard stories about Andy cuz the when Andy was at Carnegie um the story was that you know he'd do these designs that just barely fit on the board and if the chips didn't quite fit he'd get a file and he'd sort of file them to be slightly smaller you know filing the packages down it's true so you know I had fig like you what do you show somebody who who you know likes you know I figured I just I took him in the machine room and all the machines are blasting I just walked up to one of the mini computers and just turned it off and just pulled one of the boards out and said here look at this you know because it was it was a relatively new machine from deck which used um very early Gat array kind of technology and uh so that was our way of bonding well see the one the one thing I learned from P ear on is that he could match faster than anybody else because he didn't use the shift key to do upper caps he would every email you ever get from is low caps only and he told me it would actually improve his typing speed by at least 20% to not have to hit the shift key so if you want to type faster and it is some unique uh trick that he had software bugs but other than that so in these early days get step back a bit and and give us an idea of the technical environment here's a tiny startup that's down in Santa Clara it's got uh in theory Unix will run on these machines but in reality balls will bounce and that's about all you're going to see at that time at Xerox park there was a lot of work on winding systems which had a mysticism associated with it and a lot of complicated talk the 68,000 didn't have virtual memory so most most of the vax applications that you wanted to have run that didn't prevent us from promising virtual memory to everybody well we'll get into the management style in the earlier days later this is a but just give us a set an instance then and then contrast it to today in 2006 because I've listened to all of you talk about opportunities in biological new technologies changing and the statement for most of us was in the 19 in 1982 when sun began everything that we did had already been well it was pressed in Doug engelbart's papers it was pressed in all the discussion of the internet Open Standards all of that and we spent the next 20 years just implementing what the dream John the the the most computers personal computers were about the capability of a cell phone today they had networking with if they had it this is about the bandwidth that you'd have from you know a contemporary wireless network and they had about the programming model in memory footprint so if you look for something that's poised in about the same way that's it was as Arcane to program most computers and we had a machine the VAC 750 that I turned off had an 80 Meg disc drive had a couple megabytes of memory and was about a one MIP machine and Andy's designed from Stanford once it had the 68010 which had a micro code change so it could do virtual memory was the same thing but it was 1/10 the price so that was really a revolution in in capability but but they put this in and it had a bit map display also so when sun started was before there was a IBM PC was before there was a Macintosh so Sun started in ' 82 ibmc in 84 right and uh the the target we had was very clear which is we wanted to run the same kind of applications that people were previously running on a VX machine on a much lower cost personal computer and it just happened to be a you know Motorola chip that was the only good chip at the time and later of course we P it over to the spark uh chip but at the time it was kind of a revolutionary you know idea to give each engineer scientist their own machine so they could actually get their work done instead of having 30 people trying to share a one liip you know VX machine and getting 30 kilobot or whatever it is kilo instructions per person the average well there was also the in and Sun the Network Stanford University Network you PR the entire design on the Assumption and N right so so of all things EET was actually a standard because uh sir spark decided to give it away and make it an open thing and Stanford was one of the beneficiaries of the early um Ser giveaway so we had an EET ad St for when all this activity took place and it was obvious that a standard interface that at the time was a you know yellow cable but otherwise you know worked fine was an Obviously good idea to plug into and you could exchange data and share data um so I think the the biggest missing part was actually the the Berkeley Unix that bill was finishing at bur I also had Dave bogs and I stayed up all night one time we built an extra he built an extra run of some unibus ethernet cards that we debugged enough of that I could connect those back 750s were connected with probably a very similar ethernet design to what you had in the Prototype Suns because that was all contemporary before you really could buy decent uh networking you know like a network board that would have two packet buffers so you wouldn't lose one when two arve close together something modern like that so the machine downstairs that early sheet metal beauty that you can see downstairs at the bottom of uh as you as you came in had a was multibus it had a processor board a memory board a graphics board so we'd have 256k on a board about this big and then to make sure that these would function when they arrived at the customer site that was your job Scott and you built as I remember a Burnin facility highly sophisticated with plastic sheets across a plywood box and you'd put them in there and let them run and let the temperature go that was third generation we just turn the thermostat down on the uh on the air conditioning and let them heat up so how did you divide the responsibilities early on in production in marketing and all the components of a standard company yeah well John you know John was our original sales guy and he had a table and he had remember those old pink slips you used to use instead of email to who called and we would literally when as soon as Bill Joy got on board we started getting calls from around the world people saying I want to buy one guy I remember he called and he said is Bill working here com he said yeah he said I want two of whatever you got what are you selling that was literally some guy in Europe we actually shut down Europe because we had a hard time supporting it for a while so we shut it down till later but John used to organize his pink slips by time zone and he would come in in the morning he would just start on the left of his table and move right so he was kind of sales uh I did purchasing during the day and I'd have like four or five lines lit up at one time and then I when they stopped ringing which would be about 6:00 I go back and get whatever had come in unbox it build the shelves label the boxes put the stuff in and then I was writing a little early Erp program on our Onyx Unix box using VI to kind of do our bill of materials and then Veno did everything else that was kind of what I did but the thing you didn't say about John and his sleep slips is every once in a while John would just take all the slips and throw them in the trash he said it's high-tech if it's an important they'll call back just like email today well I'll jump go ahead can I go back to the technical environment of time because I think what what people I mean those of you old enough maybe remember this but obviously we were running the same software environment as was running on the tech VX 750 780 machines which was actually what most of Academia used today you know people like would buy these Tech machines throw out the VMS installation call up Bill at brookley or his able assistant and get the tapes delivered load up these tapes that were released from Berkeley in a version 4.1 or whatever and then rely on that Berkeley Unix to run their environment right and what they were going to get with the sun machine was exactly the same software at 1/10th the price for the hardware so it was a very compelling you know value hope the museum has at least one machine which could still read such a tape you know what made Andy such a great entrepreneur was he was always focused on this sort of value proposition without any marketing around it and I think that was really let me just remind you of that first Economist article with Andy and a white T-shirt very thin standing next to this ugly metal box and the economist headline was $10,000 graphic Workstation do you remember this $10,000 so when you added a disc I think the price went up well was still working on getting rid of those thiss but um so going back to the early division of test so one of the the prompts we had actually was to hire a marketing guy and this was actually part of the wasn't part of the Venture financing that we had to higher VP of marketing and um we know could say more what the issues were but clearly we did okay without a marketing guy for a while I actually recommend most startups not hire a marketing guy for positioning till a little bit later all right now Jump Ahead a bit sun went from first year as I recall 10.2 million to 50 million to 100 million it was 8 and2 39 10 110 210 4 51 billion then a billion yeah I lose track after that six so those are the first X number of years now in that period as we went from a tiny entity with 14 or so people to a billion dooll company there were always in the Press people have opinions people were saying isn't it time to bring in more mature management there was the Wall Street Journal quote at one point in Q4 of 89 that said I got to go they got to get we got to bring in a senior manager like John Scully John we did try getting in Owen Brown for a while he lasted about 9 months oh listen that but let's not talk about that be nice well all right but so now there's this period in a in a lifetime of a company where scale matters and so there are different skills that you need but John one one thing to keep in mind is we were never small company we were a0 billion doll company not a0 million doll company and wean fundament architected for that is this a phrase used in The Venture Capital World a z billion doll company you know I I I I gave a presentation on entrepreneurship in 1986 that I still have on my website and it has that same slide of the difference between a 0 billion company and a0 million doll company talk a bit about the group of people you brought together and and it's an attitude difference right it's an approach difference it's how you architect the company you can architect computers but you can also architect company so what did you say in that 1986 presentation about Innovation and hiring talented people how did you approach it then it was simple Andy got Bill to join Bill said I won't join unless Laura and John Gage join that was a pre a precondition correct and then people started hopping in the boat we got Bill Shannon and Tom lion and James goling and all of these folks who came to work with Bill and Andy and recruit was just me and VOD staying out of the way it's like a bowling alley you get the first pin and that's why the rest get the rest get knocked Downer but but fundamentally John when I first met Andy when I first met Andy you have no idea how hard my job [Laughter] is when when I first met Andy there were six licenses of all of the sun technology and Andy wanted me to license it because he had a year to go on his PhD and he tried to convince me to license it and my whole argument was I'd rather have Andy than the technology and so that's why the Company formed and and you know as Scott said once we got Andy we got bill because we got Bill we got you and Eric and sort of half a dozen other people who got other people um started the ball rolling today people say Silicon Valley is in trouble Silicon Valley the United States are in trouble there's not enough attention to Innovation there's not enough investment if I bring up the simple three-letter H1B what do I hear from you what's the status today as compared with 1982 Scott feels strongly about it yeah how'd they let you in I mean that that's the that's the I mean both these guys weren't born here James goling wasn't born here and you go around and look at the Innovation that sun has and uh in the microprocessor space in the we we we are absolutely we're just torching ourselves by not letting all of the really smart people come here to the valley and and in fact uh we shouldn't let them in unless they commit to staying for 10 years after they get their degree and we got exactly the opposite strategy what do we we want them to come here get married have kids and then they won't leave and do the brain drain back to their home country and we it's it it's fascinating to me it's fascinating that this isn't so brain dead obvious but why would we want another James goling or Andy or venod to come to our our geography and in our country and setup shop here you know H how many billions of dollars of tax taxes have you paid Andy I mean let's not talk about that you are hardly a burden on our society well it's a it's a it's a moment in when we began in 1980 the iits fought more amongst themselves than organized as they have today alumni associations so no you've been very involved in TI to be able to put money from the valley into India in particular China is exploding how would a now a company of well I called up today to find out the most recent badge number 198,199 so we're almost 199,000 badge that's just people that are our sun employees the uh contractors and those that cycle in and out and change their status move out move back in when you look at the the the the fan out of this at some point you could assert that every CTO in Taiwan many people in Japan people in Korea passed at some point or another TCS Sun so there's a family here in fact here is a family there's a family I feel like an earthworm or something H well remember the motto of the computer Museum get them on tape before they [Laughter] die hi son we' got you so now thinking about the next 5 or 10 years here's a big company it's had hundreds of millions of people in some sense touched by the technology that it spread how do you see the next 5 10 years globally barriers are down the conditions are different today people believe today at one point you said it's a more mature world and there's an acceptance of Open Standards in way there never was 20 years ago how do you see the next 5 to 10 years well you're our futurist there's more opportunity now than before because there's more there's more disciplines in which there's the same kind of opportunity More's law brought Information Technology Information Technology enables now other disciplines so the the breadth of the business PL incredible creative Innovative plans you see is just stunning and and you know is far more than you'd see in the things that worked I didn't obviously see all the plans 20 years ago that was the business I was in but if you look at what you're seeing now and you realize what's going to be successful from these things it's just here's what else is different there were huge Geographic barriers when we got started like trying to do business in Europe with the virtual Network they aren't there and brand was a huge barrier because people didn't know and and see or trust but I remember when Netscape came up with their browser Netscape went from a non brand to a brand just seemed like everybody knew in our industry now look at what has happened with the most stunning brand we've ever seen with Google do you know anybody on the planet who doesn't know the Google brand it's it's it's just but you know what we're going to get surprised at how fast a new brand gets created sometime in the next 5 years and it's going to make Google look like Netscape which made us look like sun which made you know it just um it these things are very explosive and with you know there's like 7 million people joining the network every week 7 million new people joining the network every week and and there's still an enormous amount of growth if we add 7 million people every week through 2007 three out of four people will still not be connected to the network if you think about the digital divide is still large so we have we're still in the very very early days of driving the network of bridging and eliminating this digital divide uh Challenge and then it it's going to be actually very stunning when you can put you know another set of billion people few billion people onto the network adding value and participating so it's there's going to be a lot more stuff we always get surprised and you know you get older and older the more surprised you get I guess well that's a that's a serious issue for a mature company how do you recognize the Andy Beal shimes and the Bill Joy today are there is there a place in these big companies for them is there an active recruiting I still remember Dave Dell at one point was keeping track of the time he spent as a serious engineer at son more than he wasn't content unless more than half his time was spent recruiting I thought that was a big number and is that the case still how do we regenerate companies like sun and keep Suns bought how many companies over the last 24 years 100 at least and we'll continue we cut Andy and a bunch of bright people back we uh we bought other big companies that have people who have stayed very loyal you do it their Acquisitions you hire out of school you uh you do a lot of recruiting the number of resumes uh and we actually have a lot of what we call boomerangs my door gets hit with boomerangs every day people Wan me back in I wish we could hire all of them back in but you know what it just the Community Development actually says we don't have to bring them all back in the openoffice.org community development like we did with BSD the open Solaris Community Development 950 companies with the Java Community process are all helping the entire uh desktop Java desktop system is all based on open source Community developed the grid environments that we're creating gone are the days where they all have to be your employee and it's and it's all clutch and grab and tree hug it's uh it's a much more open and shared environment and there's lots of money to be made for a lot of people without having to go Clos in proprietary at least that's our fantasy Bill what was your rule about Innovation you used to say it occurs elsewhere it occurs elsewhere simple rule most but most Sprite people don't work for you and so if your plan depends on nothing changing it's you talk about openness Scott I remember before we started Sun I tried to buy a printer from Xerox to hook to the vax and they wouldn't tell me how it worked because they didn't want me to hook it to the VX they didn't want to sell it to me you know that was that was the old days that was the industry in 19 when we started the company is people didn't want things to work together and so uh that was a c change really we had an executive a senior executive from a very large minicomputer company at one point who wanted to shut down our Catalyst catalog program which was the catalog of software that ran on Sonos and we said why don't you want to go out and recruit people to he said because that will compete with our oems so he didn't want us to recr can you imagine like trying to do an operating system and not want people to write to your application environment so there was some very warped and different perspectives that seem a little quaint to be kind today um uh when you look back at where people were and coming in and wanting to open source NFS was one of the fun most enjoyable meetings in 1983 when he wanted to open source NFS and all of the minicomputer exacts we had on board were like those are the corporate Jewels you don't do that and in fact when when the company started the only uh cat workstations were the ones who were bundled software and Hardware Solutions which made no sense because you had to build a custom workstation to run a computer vision or some some vertical application I'm still waiting for the day when my kids walk in and say daddy did you really own a computer cuz that's the right answer and we we someday will get to the point um uh Jonathan Schwarz our Co likes to tell the story about the story of the uh beginning of the electrical industry in electricity that every company had a CEO the chief electricity officer whose whole job was to bring power to every room and piece of equipment in the organization and in some sense the concept of a CIO at Ford is is as Antiquated someday as having a chief electricity officer uh at Ford today so those models will change very very quickly and at some point it's going to tip when people move to the grid and by the way you all spend way more time on the grid than you do your company computer because every time you get in the browser and go out over the network they use the eBay Grid or the Google Grid or the uh eade Grid or whatever you're using utility computing uh and that that model is changing very very quickly well ven you've been quoted and David kirpatrick has written in Fortune you've been often quoted about the CH a huge change coming in some sense open sourcing technology around energy they moving completely as Scott would point out what's the point in trying to have things work together that aren't designed in the beginning to be to have the interfaces exposed you see in other Industries opportunities where the what the computer industry learned is now so let me make a quick comment on your question around innovation in a company like sun or any other company first whenever I look at the history of Dak in deck was our principal competitor there was only three interesting products in its whole lifetime the PDP the VT 100 terminal and the vax I mean everything else was incremental and not very Innovative Beyond sort of these initial products and it was probably created by one or two people throughout Dex history when it survived if you look back it doesn't take very many people it takes a few of the right people and it takes allowing that Innovation to happen to not cut not shut down the sun Catalyst catalog you know along enabling people empowering those people recognizing who they are and letting them go outside the box I mean I have no question that the Kia box that Andy's been working on what's it called now this I forget the new name Sunfire z z something or I don't feel bad since he doesn't know the name either but he knows and he'll take an invoice at any moment one simple product can renovate a company without going into lots of detail I think a few of the things and is working on one or two things builded that with Java uh can completely change the trajectory and in the computer business and this is the Computer History mu museum um so we can talk about it there's not a lot of innovation going on in the traditional world I mean I don't see that happening I don't see anything new out of deck I'm sorry d which is the new deck and they have a wonderful distribution system and channel and you know you have to give credit that's where that Innovation happened or in HP or in IBM um they've essentially given up on innovating and I think a few Innovative people will make all the difference in the context of the sun business but my personal view is no matter where you look there's an opportunity for innovation you can't say you want to do things the same way and complain that there's no innovation so that is Larry Ellison's model of why Innovation is dead I just want to look within my narrow domain keep doing the incremental thing and then claim there's no innovation um I look at every significant problem as a significant opportunity for Innovation you know this light bulb here it's been the same since the 1800s bugs the hell out of me and I have no doubt 15 years from now we we won't have in candescent light bulbs that's an opportunity for Innovation energy you mentioned is sort of my new passion I think there relatively Simple Solutions to energy and I'll going to propaganda pitch for those of you who are interested in contributing either energy or money to a new ballot initiative we filed in California on completely eliminating the need for imported Petroleum in this country within relatively short period of [Applause] [Music] time sending money with the claps um but there's absolutely and for those of you are interested on the kpcb website there's a presentation I have on biofuels which easily replaces petroleum um you have to just think outside the box so without going into details of that unless people here are interested i' would say there are Innovative clever ideas Edward land said Innovation is the sensation of stupidity um that's one of my favorite qus uh so there are opportunities whether you're looking in medicine or energy or lighting or you name your favorite area I can give you five ideas of really Innovative directions to take now you've focused on a few of the innovations that could alter the the P balance of power in the world when you think in a broad sense energy is definitely a geopolitical issue as you look outside the door of this room there's there are four people whose faces are on placards out there Baran packet packets in the beginning of the arpanet shugar spin dis storage uh Doug engelbart the human interface with computers man machine symbiosis and Ian southernland so those four were picked by the computer Museum as as fellows and they're just a random St well not so Random because those are the four fundamental components of what Sun built in some sense those ideas emanating from sketchpad the 1973 doctoral thesis about the human interface with a machine that had behind it the ability to allow a line drawn by hand to be perfectly straight hence Cad and on and on into computer graphics and I remember bill you said back at the beginning of sun more money is going into Atari the graphics for games and into all science and supporting its its understanding of the world so are we just 24 years from the founding of sun elaborating the same ideas fundamentally important are we doing something that might make a jump forward what's the newest most powerful well the gaming chips are still very powerful scientific chips much more so is being probably still being invested there than was same situation as we had in 82 because it's now one of the largest entertainment Industries now you were talking about consumer spending on like video games well in in a way I'm trying to turn it to investment in Technologies because in a way the old idea is the turn of the century ideas of of quantum there we are pressing Quantum barriers now this is we were not doing this in 1982 now we are we're pressing in chip design we're pressing in and you've always from the beginning said ethernet why I like 10 megabit I like 100 megabit I like th000 megabit and I don't see a reason for it not to continue so the the uh limits though that we begin to reach as we make devices ever smaller the small handhelds that bill was talking about at the very beginning the 2006 analogy to the sun workstation of of 19882 uh at some point as we make these devices smaller and ever more energy efficient we run into some well the the international technology road map for semiconductors the 2005 Edition just came out and for the first time there's a new section because moris law in traditional lithography they now starting to look past it there's a list of candidate Technologies late in the next decade will be necessary because everything goes red which means we don't know how to do it and at some point without a really Innovation we won't be able to do it anymore because we're getting down to places where the materials don't scale at some point you know maybe we won't be able to continue advancing as fast but I think there's enough candidate technologies that we can probably segue to something else John you know the the general way of saying that is I don't believe as a technology Optimist I can say there are no limits we do limit ourselves in what we believe is possible and that becomes our limit but I don't believe in the next 100 years there's any limits um years well at least I'm going to hold you to that man yes I plan on being around but but I think one joh is that you know clearly there's a lot of momentum right now in consumer electronics digital media audio video distribution and on and there's nothing wrong with that in fact it's a wonderful Market opportunity Sun itself is not you know Premier in this business but um the point is that you know very lowcost chips that are low power and have lots of transistors make great enablers for consumers to enjoy their music with a video on the go and this is just something it wasn't possible before because it was too expensive so so you know the fact that there's all this excitement around the iPod or the vpod or whatever comes next is natural because it's extends what consumers want to do and um I don't see anything wrong with that that that then drives you know more investment in lower power Technologies and other things that make that better I want to explore you just brought up a an interesting topic because over the years as Sun grew it had to it found itself in an ecosystem there was IBM there was deck the buroughs and all those had gone away then as time went on the compatriots the same Generations the cisos came and so and over the years there were a relationship with a few specific technology companies that have been interesting and convoluted one is Microsoft One is in and one is Apple so here is Apple riding the crest of the iPod Scott owns an iPod but doesn't use it as I understand so you just came from consumer electronics what do you see maybe you should step back a bit and describe how many times did we try to buy Apple three was that three times you're not going to count you know I think there's a couple of things that are going on there there are still large economies of scale when you're deal dealing with actual equipment so equipment suppliers there's large economies of scale and IP is becoming a barrier to entry uh as people use patents and intellectual property to protect their their Market positions brand is still used as a a barrier to exit but it's interesting there haven't been any other computer companies that started after sun we were the last computer company server company that survived uh I m is still there HP is kind of checked out uh in the sense that they don't really do their own microprocessor operating system web services stack or whatever and at some point you can't owem all your parts and call yourself a car company become a car dealer um what's also fascinating about our industry is there's no BMW equivalent in the computer industry in Europe and there's no Toyota in in Japan it really has gotten down to us and IBM as the only two companies doing R&D and and then we have the wild card I call Microsoft and in Intel I call that General in Motors uh as kind of the the other major R&D investor that's pretty fascinating to me that something this big this this this fundamental has kind of Consolidated down the the major R&D is being done by AMD Intel Microsoft sun and IBM uh in the infrastructure space the other thing that's happening is there's this pendulum thing where stuff ends up on the client and then gets put back in the network where it belongs and then it shows up on something new shows up on the client then gets put back it's kind of like your answering machine put your voicemail by your desk and then eventually went back into the network with the service provider and your iPod is a is like your home answering machine it's a temporary thing and I guarantee you it's going to be hard to sell a lot of iPods 5 years 7 years from now when every cell phone can automatically instantaneously access your entire Library wherever you are and and you don't have to carry two devices around so there's this pendulum or swinging back and forth and today we all carry around our desktops and we're all we're all we all have root password we're we're system administrator to a file system and an operating system as we go to what we call dope display over IP that will go away and you get very thin on your desktop as you have very good Network there's just a lot of these transition that are going on in the industry that I think are are are pretty interesting now that we've got a couple of decades to look back at it John I'll answer your Apple question though CU I mean for me it's a personal disappointment I known Steve Jobs for many years and five I had five separate times where we tried to do something major with apple and none of them happened the first time was I tried to get apple sun and Microsoft to do a common filing protocol before we did NFS and I I had I actually had what you call you know I guess we'd call now a term sheet we had had a we had an agreement but it fell through cuz someone else showed up and somebody got knocked over I think it was Microsoft fell out and then Apple fell out so we got close to doing that um remember when we went and visit him to go do the six times you reminded me of another one yeah it's like Charlie Chan then we tried to get apple to use apple and son to share the user interface for the merged Unix that we did that's a great story we went over to Steve's house and Bill and I went over I don't know if you were there or not but he was sitting under a tree when we got there with you know no shoes and he had holes in his he was sitting kind of lot style reading how to make a nuclear bomb we sat down with them and said why don't we work together on a UI and that never went anywhere no and then then we tried to do um there is a common UI red button which is contemporary this week Apple switched away from risk with their first Intel processor but when they were switching to risk we went and get very close to having Apple use spark that didn't happen twice you asked about buying apple as far as I know we only almost bought Apple once but we almost merged with apple two other times so I know of three instances where the companies almost came together so that's a total in the 20 years that I was in this business doing it at son yeah think how successful there were six close there were six very very close encounters and you know you don't see you'll see a lot of major companies that have survived over multiple decades in the valley but there haven't been that many you know kind of Valley mergers of that of that kind any any one of those would have been a big would have been a big deal and I think they were all good ideas and none of them frustrating for me at least CU I I pushed almost all of them none of them happened so bring bring me your Venture up there's no pattern there I do remember one it was 91 I think maybe 92 I it was April Fool's Day and Scully was going to have his staff meeting and you were going to have your staff meeting and so we arranged that we'd switch the vice presidents and each would go to the other's staff meeting it's true and and we made up the we got the pr was I on vacation you were there you there Larry tesler came into your staff office and presented as if he were Bill Joy and we made the 8 by1 we made the masks by the 8 by10 glossies from the PR department and you cut the eyes out and you then put them on and I can't remember were you Tesla I went to Apple and Scully came in and he looked kind of stone-faced believing there was some terrorist take over he couldn't decide until Andy began talking how many tall skinny German accented people are there that get up in front of this was a joke so he thought it was until ditel launched into how much money have you spent on Hobbit uh that secret project to take the old Bell Laboratories chip and make an apple should we let them ask some questions we shall in just a minute because I still have two more questions one is about the Microsoft relationship over the years Scott you've become famous everybody else has been relatively quiet but you've been famous for playing Hardball hockey with Steve Balmer and now as we said at the very beginning there's a different feeling in is it maturity is this the proper or is it's it's just the economy it's the economy and business relations describe this transition over the the relationship with Microsoft over the years it's it's pretty simple the world we were talking bill and I earlier about how many different programming environments that included an operating system AB a ABI or API user interface networking scheme and microprocessor environment there were literally hundreds and hundreds of developer communities around separate uh how many did deck have you said they had 22 different operating systems I there 20 something for the pdp1 alone which one of the reasons they had trouble adopting Unix is because they had been so debilitated by having so many pdp11 choices they wanted one answer for the Val he had the bunch he had all the European all the European and Asian API and if you think about it now if you're going to go do a startup you're going to go either do net Vista that whole thing or you're going to do Java JavaScript uh and you know the Java web services stack those are kind of the two platforms and the world has really gotten down to those two answers it was really kind of incumbent upon the two companies as kind of the leader of those two efforts to provide interoperability to bury the hatchet and and uh stop all of the noise it was a lot of it was just theater and fun anyhow I I miss those days cuz they they come to me and I just can't share them anymore you're among friends Scott yes you can say a few of them right so but but it really isn't more so we're working very hard and there's lots Greg papadopolis is spending a lot of time with Bill Gates and and the technologists are working to go make the net web services and the Java web services environment work together and and interoperate and I think that's just a necessary reality of the position both companies are in we're going to move to questions and there'll be a microphone in each of the aisles so if you have a question go find the microphone in the aisle stand in line and and get ready and I'll ask the last question which is for all three except Scott uh sun has now open- sourced pretty much everything including the hardware can you describe what the rest of you what you think of Sun's strategy in this let's start with Bill uh is this like a public performance review is that they don't work for you anymore Scott there's it's a it's a and I have 20 bucks well I think I think that's the theme that we had in the beginning and it's good to see it coming around again and um I think also that just Andy returning to the company and building some of the incredible designs he and the other Engineers have been working on you put those two things together and it gives it gives me a lot of Hope for the trajectory of the company when you coming back I no your chance to answer here he's always recruiting you see it never stops so when what do you think but so as Bill said you know SS back to its strategy of open systems um and really never really departed from it very much but there was lots of along the way um it's not about the strategy as much about as about execution and clear thinking and I think personally between what the company has in terms of Channel and brand and customers and all that and what a few people like Andy are doing by themselves will completely change the environment or has the potential to it's really a matter of execution and sun will do as well as it executes on the strategy so Andy You're a particularly you have a point of view about this it is of course unique as Sun employee number one then at one point being bored with things you said I think I can make a faster switch than Cisco and you made Granite Systems I think it was a couple of months it took you to get them to give you $220 million was it so that you could make a gigabit Ethernet switch and then you went to Cisco for a while and then you started Kia and now you're back at Sun and so implementation is in on your shoulders how do you think things are going well I'm I'm glad to be back at Sun but I was going to comment on the open source stuff it's actually surprising how tough it is to give stuff away I mean you would not believe it even for [Music] [Applause] free [Music] [Music] do we have questioners we do sir would you say who you are and are you an exson person or a customer or um I'm a with my name is Mike kiss I'm with a company called clear speed technology and uh my question is um can you comment on the trends uh both shortterm and maybe medium term on what to expect in high performance technical Computing that Computing around Math and Science versus uh sort of Enterprise and web based and that's open to all yeah so I'm I'm person very interested in in the high performance market for one one particular reason which is that it's basically an open-ended requirement in terms of how much compute power people would like to have to solve their problems faster and this is in contrast to other markets where you know if you run the same database uh you know this year versus next year you don't need a faster computer to do it next year whereas in high performance Computing you always want to get more Cycles to solve the problem at hand more quickly so this to me is actually one of the most promising growth areas for both the industry as well as for sun uh and you know I'm personally quite involved in in helping us uh to get to make more progress there describe in particular the challenges thermal for example thermal thermal heat uh well there there power consumption and cooling right which is a major problem just uh keeping the things running it's also becoming a large cost of running a a computer is in fact the power and um we we do need much more power efficient Technologies and one area where uh spark and and risk is doing really well is actually by doing many many course per chip which individually take less power and thus as in aggregate have more throughput than the industry standard architectures I guess my frustration John when we talked about Sun for the first time in 1982 was that the graphics on gra on game even the Primitive game machines at the time for the cost was so impressive compared to what scientific computing had and if we look today now it's you know many years later there still aren't the kind of commodity cost scientific machines that we saw for commodity cost personal machines the high performance scientific machines Center to be very expensive you know I was very impressed with the cell chip that IBM did uh inside of the some of the new gaming machines it's very similar in architecture that I was working on at some almost a decade ago and uh yet you know that chip exists in gaming consoles and is proposed in gaming consoles where do we see that kind of price performance and for scientists and and people doing research we don't we don't see that because those chips are not commodity to that market that's that's an incredible disappointment which you know been a constant theme for a very long time let me answer in a different way started off with cray and then the the risk chips came in and and uh if you look at the top 500 there were a lot of risk spark in the earlier days was big then all of a sudden people figured out how to strap together the Intel and Now opteron Products using Linux and that's kind of where we are today you're seeing another shift we just want to with Andy machine tiek Tokyo Institute of Technology For What probably will be Japan's largest and biggest and Japan takes superc Computing very seriously running Solaris and Linux and with open- Source Solaris with ZFS uh and the opteron Box and drace which allows people to actually uh look in and see what's going on you're going to see I think a new move over the next 3 or 4 years uh to open Solaris on opteron uh as a new architecture with some of the file system and tuning Technologies beyond that DARPA is funding three efforts today in supercomputing one from IBM around power one from Sun around a Next Generation CNT strategy called Rock from Sun and then cray and I believe when they go to the next phase it's going to end up being sun and IBM as the two players and so starting about four years from now it's going to be Rock versus Power uh in the supercomputer space uh really driving the and there might be some other wild card entrance like the cell or others as people find ways to to drive that but to me that's where it looks and we're certainly investing very aggressively to go drive the entire system technology that would allow you to do uh large scale supercomputing on a publicly available grid how deep is the pipeline bill for a for a uh cell processor is contrasted with with rock it's a deep pipeline machine or it's a I don't remember anymore do you know Andy is there getting older we're getting L later but what I was going to comment is that the HBC Market is of course they are major opportunities to innovate for one but it's also one of the few markets where uh build Choice Law which is that things get better by what was it about 60% per year in terms of cost performance actually applies so if you look at the long-term cost of dollars per per gigaflop or Tera flop in high performance Computing that is the one market where you know build projection actually has been very accurate well I was talking about the the you know over 30 years if you look at the Grand Challenge kind of applications on many of them scientific computers got faster As Much from the algorithm Ms as they did from the hardware if you can believe that say on some you know and I think if you look at the challenges in the future doing things with you know computational biology or you know understanding the brain and simulating with thinking whatever the brain does that we want to make these kind of computations run faster they'll speed up as much as a Mo's law curve would suggest so you take the product of Mo's law with this other factor which is the effective speed up on the problems that are really hard the number is just staggering invest in and most people don't most people don't would not believe that over 30 years on those hard problems you can speed up you know a factor of two every somewhat repeatedly it's just astonishing you but you think it can be like a million times over the last 30 years in like finite element methods of certain kinds a million times speed up in the algorithms invest in the mathematicians times a million times speed up in the hardware so you got a million million times this is a power so that gives room for a hundred years of technical optimism doesn't you know why don't me keep moving sir uh Eugene Mia the Le one of the lisons to the to the museum um with history of sun two two questions come to my mind one of them a technical question and the other one a sort of policy social question uh I understand the reason why you guys got started I actually used and you guys haven't mentioned so far um a sale terminal in Margaret Jacks Hall it's quite impressive in many respects and so the qu technical question is roughly how long was it either by time or model number uh were you guys finally able to make uh a workstation at least emulate something as powerful as the old sale terminals that used to say take me on yours and the second question I had actually which is more oriented toward Scott is um it has to do with the creation of Sun Federal systems and that's uh in light of the recent uh disclosure of uh uh uh terrorist Communications and and the like uh I was wondering did sudden when sudden Federal got created were you privy to this system they may refer to in the media called Echelon as an example so those are those are my two questions one social one okay so let me so the first one which is uh one thing that is not publicly known about sun is that we actually um after the company started we actually rented time on the sale computer at Stanford to keep doing our cat work because the cat software wasn't running on the sun workstation and it actually took us I think it was about 3 years to get a reasonable cat syst even after he got going so uh those of me who who remember me being around Stanford you know weird hours during those years that's that's why uh but we do appreciate it very much uh John here this is the sud system this was the S system which was a you know a high quality system it just ran on the M how how long did it take before we didn't need sale 1985 years 1985 3 years well this is the period answer is three yes it also showed the maturity Suds would allow you to scrunch all the elements on a board so closely that you wouldn't be able to insert test PR it's not quite the answer to your question because to truly replace sish head multimedia capability including video and audio we didn't have that I don't know until a few years ago so you could argue it took 20 years okay and the second question was Echelon so I don't talk about secret homeland security stuff next for next question thank well I I have one you mentioned Scott's comment on privacy I can recall this vividly because Bill had worked very diligently to create a method for distributed computing uh that would utilize to some degree the security model of Java so the notion was you would be able to allow all devices to speak with with each other on the net and they'd say well there's a common meeting area and we'll we will uh allow any entity to query any other entity and so after the demonstration that showed the printers talking about how they were offering printing services and all this was going to work uh then Scott was on stage and someone said well what what about privacy when all the devices are talking with each other you're going to really get me in trouble aren't you you said well privacy get over it you have no privacy get over it you have no privacy get over it and that in some sense very accurate observation about it's getting more clear as everybody's walking around with a camera in their pocket now everybody's got recording devices and at some point people are just going to kind of kind of put this right here and they're going to walk around and record their entire day and it's all going to get archived you're not doing that yet well you know it's and you know that's why we bought a tape company because we figured there's going to be a lot of archives next question it's all in the editing hi my name Steve I'm a employee Scott I find your analogy of the iPod Mach was actually quite fact your iPod disappear thework be gratified to hear that we're working towards making that happen at Sun but I'm actually this is kind of an easy question kind of curious first U why you don't use your iPod and you know you're not using it did I have [Applause] it yes no answer Scott yeah well suan do the kids want this I mean there you know I just don't know I I just never have time and when I'm at home you don't with with four little boys they're 4 6 8 and 10 you don't like you got to hear cuz if you don't hear anything you got to be scared so you know just I don't ever do it at home and when I'm on when I'm on an airplane I sleeping uh or reading hard copy and when I'm driving in the car I'm listening to KCBS and getting angry uh and uh other than that you know there's just no other time to to listen so and my wife doesn't really like it when I come home and put on my iPod hi honey H how's it going huh she'd rather Converse so I just I don't get a lot of music in my life right now not that he Converses anyway but that brings up another question how do you the answer is no you can't hit my iPod so there's another question how do all of you Converse you see each other occasionally you both at Kleiner Perkins see each other daily Emil email great yeah email is the principal way though bill and I have been doing a lot together in a lot of different areas recently and uh and Andy is implementing so he doesn't have time to talk to anybody I spent too much time on so we do occasionally discuss Water Systems next question yes uh commenting on the last fellow's iPod question I use an iPod while I'm running uh LSD runs which are long slow distance not the not the drug anyway uh my question was that uh I uh was would you comment on your Java compiler and how uh developers integrate with the Microsoft Windows environment as opposed to the uh Unix environment so the Java virtual machine is available on U the sun website for free download it happens 20 million plus times per month uh people just run into a a website There's 7 to 10 million websites out there that have Java content and if it's not about 2third of the PCS being shipped today come with a Java virtu machine loaded automatically in your browser those that aren't you just go to the website click it downloads like a flash player or whatever a real player whatever it just loads and then away you go so just go to sun.com and you'll look there'll be a button there it's probably on the homepage download now and you'll be one of tens of millions of people who do that every month so that's the simplest way to get Java running on your windows environment it's free too what I mentioned it doesn't how do you make money then if you're uh giving all this stuff free um that's what my shareholders are asking all the [Music] time um what we're doing is building a very large community for the Java platform and in fact there's over three billion Java devices out there there was a major announcement at CES that all of the cable companies worldwide are signing up for oap which is the open cable application platform based on the Java platform uh the Blu-ray technology all the volume DVD players think about a $100 DVD player with all the storage basically being a Java personal computer in your home connected to all of your multimedia environment uh there are a billion plus Java cards out there every cell phone out there practically is has got Java built into it all these desktop environments and all these what if if every Appliance out there on the planet is job enabled chances are we got a really good shot at selling the CPU D disc drive server infrastructure on the back end if it's a Windows Phone chances are you're not going to buy our server on the back end because it's a closed proprietary it doesn't mean we win the server deal if it's a Java device but we got a shot at it so by opening up and creating a very large Java Appliance Community with open multi vendor Community developed shared environments we got a chance to sell servers so that's how we make money that's this is our razor that's the blade thank you so much thank you I wanted to I wanted to answer your question about how we get together I mean I had the great pleasure of working with Andy and with Scott for a very long time at son VOD VOD went to KP in 86 I think and uh now uh I'm at KP with getting a chance to work with with John who also has been involved and still on the sun board but he was on the he's on the sun board since what ' 82 sometime right so he was with has been with the company as long so and also John with you of course going back since before we started Sun so it's been my great pleasure not now to really get to work with John and venod more closely is is a great pleasure for me but it's all all the same cast of characters for me it is an interesting thought that the valley which ordinarily is not thought of as a political entity John dur was a driv force behind an initiative in California years ago and he brought everyone in the valley together to say well there's a there's an attempt to make every officer of every corporation personally liable when the stock price fluctuates and so that initiative he he got his feet wet to some degree and now so and venod now you have a political initiative so it's an interesting thought that TI technology companies the most advanced Venture capitalists are taking to The Ballot Box to do something that affects public policy I'm know if it'll be successful or not I'm trying a simple thing which is cut down the use of petroleum and I think there's some pretty Simple Solutions while we start dreaming about 2040 and hydrogen all that crap by the way I believe hydrogen will never ever happen and it's not needed either so but you know when you see a simple idea that makes sense you try and push it and you're sort of the old engineer in yeah we can get on to nuclear in a minute sir yes hello U my name is Alex mednik I was at Sun in the late 8s and I now work at Ecom Mortgage Banking software um based on open source technology and I applaud um all the efforts towards um open source and Java and um making devices and and um applications available uh in in all all devices and and places um but I'm wondering what do you think prevents um this this whole movement uh what is it about people that they stay with Microsoft and they don't really see the value of this and and what what are we missing here why isn't there more widespread use of this now and and and you know let's just really think about what what's holding us back so my view is there's massive barriers to exit and and people don't think when they adopt Technologies what the Escape Clause is there's there's a shelf life of a banana with every piece of technology you're going to buy uh and it within 18 months no matter what you buy from anybody it's absolutely obsolete within 18 months yet when we do an a purchase decision at the corporate level we think about what is the purchase price the barrier to entry we think about the ongoing cost of operation the net present value of the lease cost and the air conditioning and the operation the upgrade we never think about the exit cost and the exit cost dwarfs absolutely dwarfs by an order of magnitude the other two costs and whenever purchasing agents do their analysis they only do A and B and they forget C and C is a plus b * 10 minimum and as as a result we end up getting into switching off of the PC is something we'd all love to do but we can't because the exit costs are so high the Mainframe is equivalent to an airplane with pedals it is so OBS I mean it is just I mean the the price performance of that hog is unbelievable with the buried exit is in fact the buried exit might be infinite now because everybody's dead who knows what's inside that thing you got to go down and read the tapes down St to figure out what's going on inside those things so that's that's what's preventing people plus there's a lot of anthropology there's a lot of where does my job go if I move this direction I walk into Data Centers everywhere and they look like Frankenstein's body parts from many different obsolete companies and and everyone looks unique and why in the world does it why does Ford do a data center think they build cars for gosh sakes but there's just an anthropology and a way of doing business and a lot of marketing to convince you that sun doesn't understand your business we understand it deeply we'll build something custom for you and you know that's the IBM Global Services we got more mechanics pit this going to be a long and and I and Microsoft just floods the Airways with andell and Intel with here please become super Compu or super user root root password uh systems administrator have any of you really enjoyed being systems admin I shouldn't ask this crew anybody hanging out anybody hanging out in a computer Museum on an evening you know probably enjoys being super user but that's just that's just not a mere moral how many of you are super user to the telephone Network I mean we that's why you can make phone [Music] calls and that's why he can listen to my phone call and to you I I was just going to comment this probably more business opportunities on open source and outside of the Microsoft uh uh domain if you will because anything that gets big in the Microsoft domain is something they want to take over and then your business opportunity is zero it's Mankind versus Microsoft mankind will win but I hope so but but let me let me give you a slightly different more optimistic view which is Microsoft you want Microsoft to win man no no no yeah Microsoft did one thing well they got a Market but if you really look around you there's lots it was a function that the PC did well and the PC is great at it and as Scott said there's natural monopoly in these systems and Microsoft got that position but there's lots of new markets in open markets Google's proven that Apple has with the iPod and the consumer devices where nobody has a natural monopoly the bulk of the Computing we do 10 years from now will not be just on a PC I think the PC will still be around but the bulk of what we do will be new New Uses new applications and I think those fields are wi wide open as Apple's proving Google's proving Yahoo's proving and I can go down the list I I I'm a Mac User so um I have to say you know after all these years we started Sun you know we knew about what's going on at Xerox if somebody finally put Unix together with the best in the world user interface and made a a thing I sent one to my father he's been using Mac os9 and he was just he's 80 years old and he refused to change and and Christmas day he calls me and says it doesn't work anymore you know just they can't fix it at the store so I sent him an OS 10 machine expecting him to call me and ask me to help and I bought Apple remote desktop so I could administer his computer he he just got it back up and he installed it himself and he's on the net he's sending me email and says it all works fine and he never even asked me a question now that I mean I'm just I'm I I I'm flabbergasted but I mean it really is that good and people just don't know you know and that's Unix in there right it's even simpler than that and my six-year-old just logs into his Sunray and he goes to his game sites and he does his Java Games from a browser and he never asks me anything other than can I play and there's no user Administration done in our house because there's nothing to administer because it just a flat panel display and that's the next level of of Simplicity that we all need to get to uh and ubiquitous Computing there you go well one uh aspect of this take all the world the four billion people that aren't involved in Computing that digital divide you were talking about Scott the ability to drop the energy forget the price of the single screen but just the energy demand PC well there are some PCS now with the new LED technology that dropped down under 10 watts so we have a but to go into a Rwanda as an example to provide some access for people across a fiber Network built out across the country putting a simple screen at the end of that Network it's going to be done Wireless so you don't even have to wire The Joint you can do it uh with with 3G Wireless technology and run dope over 3G Wireless to very thin um stateless devices that are secure safe zero Administration and uh able to handle Network intermittency which a dop display does because when the network goes down your desktop keeps running in the network and uh as soon as you get reestablished away you go well so we just started we began by discussing the tiny device the cell phone and in all the lists of companies and Technologies and Investments uh that we have uh cited is interesting we left out Samsung what are they now $160 billion so now there is an entity that's investing with a PhD ratio that is a very high investing in research and investing in all the technologies that seemingly rule the next 5 10 years how do you see the shift is there a shift from Silicon Valley to Korea or to Huawei or to in India or any number of companies ypr a number of companies do you see any fundamental change coming well they they have locost of capital so they're making major Capital Investments and make more LCD panels than anybody else or whatever it's similar to the Japanese 20 years ago where the cost of capital was very low cost in Japan in the 80s uh the cost of capital is higher in the US so in the 1980s there was a view that Japan was the great threat and today there's a view that possibly emerging and built on the back of Open Source Innovation can occur elsewhere by those that are there's a one opportunity make a lot of money on fed panels right now but once these get more mature and lower cost more it's not a zero sum game and anybody who studied economics it's not they're going to win at our cost if they win we'll do better if we win they'll do better and and it's that that I don't know who's driving the the the fear that if if somebody there goes to work I'm going to lose a job here it just isn't true and we all have to work on eliminating the digital divide getting everybody to work everybody less ignorant everybody more aware and everybody standing on the shoulders of everybody else on the network and everybody out there innovating and creating and a lot of good things will happen and it's not I mean you shouldn't the only thing you should fear is that these developing countries don't develop because that's what breeds the ignorance the bitterness the the the the terrorism all the rest of it so the real important issue is that we get this technology out there we get wireless out there we get uh uh low cost low power uh server technology client technology out there we get open source out there we share and we get everybody on the network because I think it's just going to be a safer and and better world if we can get that done where is that that battling combative this is a different this is a sharing initiative this is something that puts the he invented it man this guy you know I I I always say we're a little Al gorish when we say we invented Community Development in open source but this guy really brought all of those ideas to the industry he's never gotten credit for it I keep saying it over and over and and over again but you know what he did the model he put together at Berkeley with the Berkeley software distribution which we did with NFS which we did in the Unix Community Development and which was the uh the the original uh site of what we did with the Java Community process and everything everything we've done around Community Development as the largest donator of Open Source Community we've invented uh Community Development models we've invented licensing models you know it all comes out of Bill's idea that Innovation happens El crank up another frame down there you got to put his picture up there I really think he he he you in the most important way around Community Development sir Tony yeah thanks John um so um I'm Tony werman um I was one of Sun's first isvs but uh never worked for sun he was 12 when he got started yeah thank you um so um these days um I run the center for open source investigation at Carnegie melon West right here in Mountain View um but you talked a you've talked a lot lot about um the technology but but let's face it 6 weeks from now Sun is going to be 24 years old and the way you get to to grow and survive that long is by establishing some leadership principles inside the company and a culture inside the company that makes it survive and grow and and I'd really like to hear from from any or all of you uh what what you guys think uh there might be some guiding principles of culture of leadership that others could take away from your experience you guys do that well Really Scott that's mostly for you and it's not about hockey come on you know it's it's pretty it's pretty simple I've always believed in the inverted or chart I work for the people who report to me uh I've also always believed that nice guys can finish first that you don't have to cheat lie steal or break the rules and integrity and character has been an absolutely critical component of this company and I don't think you can find many EX employees at son who will tell you anything other than it was a very high integrity High character not necessarily always competent but uh um a very high integrity High character place and we tried to let people work there and leave from sun with dignity and respect no matter what the circumstances were unless they were a crook and then I had no problem you know foregoing the dignity and respect PL and then it just developed a culture where people had Pride worked hard did great things and uh and and sharing we didn't really start calling it sharing but we've been talking about open interfaces forever open systems for open minds or whatever and and we we finally just said there's a simple word for what we do we share very very different and not necessarily as successful as say the Intel model or the Microsoft model or the Mainframe model but it's our model and it hasn't treated any of the four of us poorly uh nor has I think mistreated uh the nearly 200,000 employees that have come through and nor has it mistreated the the dozens and dozens of CEOs that are now running other companies that worked at Sun from Google on down through through the rest of them so uh to me that's that's kind of what is is most fundamental about it and uh the the buzz phrase itself is kick butt have fun you know we're going to go out and compete fairly and by the rules but the the big ORD you got to have fun you got to enjoy what you're doing April fools jokes we have a dress code you must uh we send you home if you come in not dressed and you know it's just remember the guy came in from a mini computer company and got mad at uh Gilmore because he he had his long denim skirt that he wore that had a embroidered whale jumping out of the water spouting and I said John what are you wearing a skirt for he says yeah you know we was working back in the cement uh cement floor assembly area and he said it gets really hot in the machine it's just cooler with a skirt I go go and wear your skirt anyhow this guy came in from this sitting and he wanted to change the dress code cuz he thought that when we did plant tours that people would get offended by seeing a guy in a skirt and I said oh cont they'll think he's really really smart and it's I don't know I I digress but I don't know what do you guys a lot of CEOs will say the door is open you can always come talk to me and it's often not at all the case uh do you think you've always had this style let's go eat at McDonald's let's go get our haircut at what's the cheapest haircut super cut Super Cuts let's just go out in the cafeteria and at a for a period critical in Sun's growth in the uh in the cafeteria to get from engineering to the cafeteria you had to walk along VP row because the pathway was stopped right by your office so every engineer at Sun on their way to lunch could stick their head in your office and say why did you say that this is really how it is so there was a direct feedback and then the years when we moved to San Antonio and there was that giant Ford Aerospace building and you were up in the you know the elevation and nobody can see you there was this period of Disconnect and now it seems to be back to much more this daily day dayto day is is that a big component it strikes me it is but but uh what's your view well actually we're using the network so I do radio shows I just recorded a radio show today that I do every couple of weeks it's called The Melia report it's on demand uh on the network and I do pet peeves and what's cool and I complain about the food and the cafeteria and talk about a great deal we want or I cold call employees anywhere in the world and I just we just want a big 440 Mill $400 million deal down in Mexico and uh I called the the sales guy on it and I said hi I'm from the Mexican education we're uh canceling your order he just started I got this all on radio he just started laughing he obviously recognized my voice but you know it's it's that kind of informal uh you know open atmosphere that we try to create good thanks yes next question hi my name is TW and I'm a sun user and shareholder so I have a question um there's been a lot of speculation about how sudden may go the way of SGI which was once a industry Titan and well you know major player now reduced to a footnote um do you have that fear and what are the plans to so let me let me tell you what we have we have $4 half billion dollars of cash in the bank we're on our 17th straight year cash flow positive from operations we have one of two developer communities that we lead with the Java Community to uh environment versus the Net environment we have one of three operating systems that I think matter anymore with Windows Solaris and red hat being the three and I kind of challenge any of you to go off and do a a startup to go write some Enterprise or web-based application environment not to one of those three uh environments we have one of the three microprocessor architectures that are left with power spark and uh the x64 architecture we have $150 billion installed base we have a patent portfolio that's off the charts we have probably the the best product line we've ever had from a hardware storage 36% of the world's archive data now resides on Sun's uh libraries and if you don't think that's sticky uh you know you're more likely to trade out your main frame than you are your tape Library we have an incredibly important position and we are the most partnered company in the world we partnered with Microsoft I just did our big deal at Redwood City with Oracle yesterday TI is our Fab partner from way back uh EDS Accenture uh CSC NEC and the systems integration uh pieces you look all all around the world we have thousands of applications and the barriers to entry in our business are actually big because it takes a lot of capital to go do what we're doing so I feel very comfortable that people are going to continue to need to buy servers they're going to not want to buy build their own Frankenstein there's very few companies like Google that are going to go off and do their own you know computer grids people are going to start wanting to buy the grids complete or even use the grids in the public utility grid model and it's us and IBM are the only two companies out there that can build a grid try and run salesforce.com or eBay or Google on Windows yeah so you know it's US versus red hat and I think we can beat red hat so I feel very comfortable that and I think vode was right if we execute if we stay focus execute pay attention to the details and don't lose track of quality and service I I I think the the world is our oyster here uh from a technology perspective and a and a business opportunity perspective we made some mistakes during the bubble but we also put $7.5 billion doar of cash in the bank during the bubble too so we didn't screw up too bad we didn't spend it all so so with the commoditizing of computers price of dropping what would you why would computers have been commoditizing forever and that's not a fair statement because we're spending 2.2 billion it has the shelf life of a banana Commodities do not um in the hardware business they do in the food business but in the hardware business do not a 10 penny nail is a commodity cuz 5 years from now it's still good but a 10-year-old any technology piece is not good go down look in there I mean just look around here and see if you want anything that's more than three years old more than a year old in anything in this Museum if you want any of it CPU hours are a commodity like kilowatt hours are a commodity but the GE turbines that generate that power are anything but Commodities and the grid equipment that we're creating is anything but a commodity it just generates a commodity of G uh CPU hours gigabyte months display days uh those sorts of things so it's just a very different different model so in other word I should hold on to my sunto I'm there with you thank you has he convinced you twe is that is that it's the sir hi how you doing my name is uh Adam McDonald and uh I breath there and uh my question is for um Bill Bill jooy good um I really liked his uh article in uh wire 2000 about how the future doesn't need us and I guess my question is uh in your opinion um you know how how many years do you think it'll be before you know we're living in a you know like kind of like an orwellian dystopia you know um if you believe that at all a cheery before you I so glad you got to answer that one the standard rule about the Futures to predict what or when but never both at the same time um that's good that's good I I think you know to be serious Scott is right I mean technology and PR privacy aren't are on collision courses I I mean surveillance and I'm not just talking about what the government is doing but um I don't know how many people here have used the latest video conferencing equipment but if you're video conferencing into a room with some of the latest video conferencing equipment you can hear conversations that other people in the room can't hear I mean it's quite amazing um you know you basically can ease drop into the room your video conferenced into um um are you driving in Britain just announced that what they're going to keep track of where all the cars are um technology makes these things cheap and you know some people have proposed we just make all the underlying data public so that anyone can do it so at least that we don't get a a tip towards a a government that is doing this for you know preservation of power is usually what it's done for but I I think that the tip towards us the public space being much less Le private or even with terahertz radiation the private space being much less private is is one that's hard to fight because it's kind of got Mo's law on its side so we have to fight to hold on to what we want uh with the law but technology doesn't make that easy and the capture devices are the cameras and the microphones and the heat sensors and the motion sensors and uh you know all the rest of that are just becoming so low cost and so ubiquitous uh I mean your FastPass in your car and hasn't everything we've been said here been fact checked in Wikipedia already I mean you don't get there's no distance between now you're putting GPS in every cell phone and you know you don't go anywhere you leave your wallet before you leave your cell phone at home these days so it all it all becomes part of the public space very very quickly now a lot of cities are installing video cameras in all public places to reduce crime basically I I sense a new business skips for those of you know in the Federal Business Skiffs which are totally like electronic proof kinds of environments so you actually probably can rent skiff Motel [Music] skiff the cone of silence this is I want a piece of it you go for that one well and Bill you have to tell your father yesterday Google Earth put up the Macintosh version oh they did yeah so there's a Mac version of Google Earth now you can download it which allow my problem with my problem with helping him by the way is he has his own names for everything on the screen that I think he shares with no one else on the planet so I don't know I can't have a conversation with him about what he sees you know there's another fundamental aside from government the government regulation the e911 regulation forces any phone company that uh in the United States they must according to the law report your location within 50 m to the police from the fire that's a laot now it's not implemented as well but that's the law the regulatory regime uh initiatives will take a political path but every day someone's coming up with yet another one of these Regulatory regimes and because of the atmosphere for terrorism the notion that it's the proper thing that everything we how can I protect you if I don't know where you are at all times and if I don't know with whom you are at all times the echelon question goes to traffic that kind of protection we might not want this is so what actions can we take now this 911 rule you're referring to is not related to 911 the event you this is the 911 emercy name the yeah it's related it's the it's the requirement that all cell cell phone operators in the US provide Public Safety with your location if you if you dial 911 well you know if you're an emergency and that's the only way you can communicate your location you will benefit from that but it also business opportunties a friend of mine's uh 11-year-old son uh crashed into a tree on the snowboard and just called his mom with a cell phone and then she called ski patrol and they went and got him he's you know so it's a strange way of calling for help to call home first and then call back but you know and I didn't know where he was but he said on you know third tree down from the left or whatever well we can find him well sir hi um I'm Dave edstrom 19-year Sun employee and want to just thank you guys for starting Sun um and uh something that I thought was uh worth capturing since I guess the concerning is that you guys are all over 50 going to croak soon or something but um um seriously one of the things that uh I think really stood the test of time is the phrase the network is the computer and I remember uh Bill I'm sure you don't remember um but we were having a dinner in Aspen in summer 98 and you told the story about how that phrase came about which I thought was and the rest of us at the table thought was fascinating I was wondering if you could retell that thanks I'd like to hear it well just tell me what he told you I well actually I I credit John with coming up with the with I hope I did then too because I thought I think John I think John came up with it and I think John it was on a trip to China wasn't it that we where where did this is when we learned about the style John Hennessy was just here at Stanford people come in they give a lecture and they leave at chingua you come in and you start at 8:00 in the morning and they expect people to talk until 6:00 at night with a break for lunch lunch so after the fourth or fifth hour you are scrambling to come up with something to say and try to reduce the rules about building something to the smallest simplest one sentence statement the network is the computer the machine is the manual that one never quite caught on but the notion is that if an 80-year-old gets a box and turns it on it should work I do recall we used to get you guys to go take a sun out of its box as a customer would receive it and try to make it work so I tell another story about Bill Joy it just occurred to me uh Bill used to go to Japan back in the 80s and and he was just absolutely red I mean they would just so bill would give a talk a chalk talk in a room with a big chock whiteboard up here and Bill would every now and then just switch nervously just switch colors and so he he filled up a whole wall and there were like a whole room full of uh Japanese Engineers hanging on his every word and writing down everything he says and so he ended up with this thing looked like the the rainbow and on his way out he just for fun said and the colors [Music] matter they still haven't erased the board it's it's the Rubik's cube of Japan and I'm convinced that's why they're no longer a threat in the computer [Music] industry thank you thank you sir yes uh my name is Mark lenhard I'm a Serial entrepreneur and uh this is I guess is for Bill Joy and anyone else that has read K's new book The singulari is near speaking of Mo's law and why the future may or may not need us what do you think of his thesis well I I I blured this book so I did read it um I think I think what what I said in the back of the book was you know it's worthy of some discussion I don't agree with everything Ray says but uh he's got a group of dedic people who work with him and he's got a lot of facts and a lot of his curves about the progress of Technology are very interesting and certainly as accurate as anyone else has and I think out to 2020 um you know I think we can stay with lithography probably somewhere near or something else somewhere near what Ray says but I mean I don't I don't completely agree with feno there are physical limits to certain aspects of con reputation that we already know there are certain things that are impossible even and there are physical limits to other kinds of things and we know there are limits to to certain information things we can we can do in certain ways so um I'm not sure the progress will be quite as as linear on those graphs that Ry has out into the late 21st century as he thinks for no other reason that the economics that justify the investment to keep us on those curves may not be there let alone there may be some difficult things we don't quite figure out how to do the progress over the last 30 years has just been so fast that I I I think to hope for it indefinitely would be would be foolish it's 8:35 uh our contract is to go to 8:30 uh let's take a vote shall we continue all right I already have a lot of yeses do I have any knows so let me this offer it's not embarrassing for yall to get up and leave to me or to you so if you feel like you need to go go for it sir oh I'm sorry this side sir yeah hi uh maybe a question for Andy and venod um you know everybody's talking about the you know having the entire music library on your phones on your mobile phones Etc connected to the network can today's n what are the challenges in today's networks to be able to handle that and can today's Network Technologies and you know capabilities handle it so I I do have one uh observation which actually differs from what scottt was saying earlier which is people seem to want to own their music because they listen to the same kind of songs over and over and over so music in that sense is very different than say video because you you don't tend to watch the same movie over and over and over you at my house Barney over except for Barney but um in of all things video actually lends itself much more to a streaming you know uh onetime rental whatever model which is also in the interest of the cont an owner the music where people all along have you know made copies on their cassettes or tapes on now on their on their iPod so there's a significant usage difference between how people enjoy music versus how they would uh for example enjoy movies or video and from a networking standpoint you know the bandwidth is actually there today so it really came down to a business model of how content owners can make money of these services and it was you know you live for the longest time you can't make money on you know you offering music on the internet until Apple proved everybody wrong and now everybody is of course trying to offer those kind of services so Andy what do you that that's a so this is headon with existing legal models of intellectual property so what do you think the future of intellectual proper the important thing about music is that you know there always was a home recording Act and the CD was never encrypted so in contrast video was always encrypted and you you actually cannot make a legal copy of a DVD so unless you want to break the law you know there's no legal ways of doing that whereas you're perfectly within the law to take your CD and record them on your Mac and then download them to your iPad I I have two observations one is I I don't understand the economics of building the Next Generation networks to the home because unless some major transformation occurs because the people who are going to write the checks to build a network don't seem to be the people who make the money because the Network's built and so some structural realignment has to occur so that why would I build a network so other people can get all the market cap I don't see that second thing is I I don't watch television and I don't I just am completely mystified by what just happened at the consumer electronic show that everyone cares about this interactive television and all this stuff that Gates and Intel were talking about because I I young people seem to play video games they they surf the web on their computer they listen to music on their iPad I don't see them spending a whole lot of time on this traditional you know watching it by appointment or delate appointment like you have with a too it seems to me that entertainment is coming more and more people watch movies in bed on that laptop computer I see entertainment more and more being multimedia integrated on that smaller screen so seems to me that if they take TV and un bundle it maybe no one will show up you know so it's it's it's going to be quite interesting to see what happens because you know it's the same kind of game we saw with 3G networks where people in the end felt I think like they overpaid and this there may be an overinvestment going on here because I I think entertainment is going to probably come from different place and people who TV focused think it's com you'd mentioned there were 20 some million downloads a month of the Java environment and in your announcement with Eric Schmidt with Google this played a fundamental part of the announcement the press in general said oh boring they didn't reveal anything new but to me the notion that moving the Google access out through this volume of java downloads was a big deal but you were just at Cas you heard Larry you heard discussion bu what do you think about the future of this technology of which technology well of the of the entrance by Google into the provision of video on demand you know I think Google has it exactly right that people don't want to buy software they want to use it people don't want to set up a server they want to access the services and uh people don't like free is a good model uh you know at some point you know it may go you know they pay you to uh to go to their and and and fundamentally you know there's a distribution Channel we have with 20 million uh plus uh Java run times going down to PC environments that's that's a partnership that Google wanted to have with us and we're helping distribute their Toolbar to the microsof it was harder for them to work a deal with Microsoft to download the Google Toolbar than it was to work with us to download the toolbar so we were a natural partner we had a very interesting channel that kind of activity is going to continue and again this gets back to if you open it up if you share if you make it free you create very large channels that can be monetized in non I shouldn't say non-traditional ways because TV has been free forever and it's an advertising model so or it's a distribution model let's see I guess hi Chris Novak I work at IDT son admire while I was too young to see the musical fabri for I'm glad I'm still alive here to see you the Computing Fab [Music] for question may be primarily for Scott you mentioned a couple times intellectual property um but I want if any of you had any comments on reconciling the the apparent differences between what you're mentioning setting it free open source sharing it with everybody and still as you have an outstanding patent portfolio able to protect your own implementation and um any comments you have on that yeah so uh without getting into the lung and in fact I I'd encourage you to meet Greg Papadopoulos here who is our Guru around open- Source licensing models uh how they talk about and and uh contemplate intellectual property what protections there are what indemnifications there are uh and and it's all a very uh complicated and not entirely tested uh uh environment about what does open source mean and if I grab some code out over the network am I free and safe from a troll am I free and safe from uh the company that actually owns the IP even if they open sour and there's there's there's not simple and clear answers we could literally spend uh we could we could do a full uh year of intellectual property uh case studies uh in in Business School uh trying to understand all the intricacies of this but patents are very important to protect yourself when another company comes at you so there's mad mutually assured destruction so I'm not sure Microsoft wants to come at us because we could go back at them it's a little more complicated when you get the trolls and um you know there are people who go out and buy patent and they go after and you can't go back after them because there's no there there it's just uh a difficult situation sometimes corporations turn into trolls uh we got nailed by a particular film company from Rochester New York uh for uh supposedly uh having job INF Fringe and we had to pay a $90 million payment I call it a loan uh because that particular company is moving into the digital business big time and they're going to step all over our IP so that's why I call it a loan with a high interest rate um unless we can work out something more amicable but you know that's one of the reasons why and and by the way if you if you are going to use open source code and embed it into your product or your OEM or what you better be careful that somebody doesn't come after you for stepping up because you're fundamentally if you build that into your platform you'd better have some sort of indemnification some sort of protection from the supplier of the software or be ready to go deal with the IP issues because they ain't going to go away and I don't think that some of the companies with lots of Ip and large market caps are just going to roll over and go away and let you take their methods their IP their Trade Secrets and just run with it and uh you know I think one of the one of the more interesting uh departments in business is going to be the legal department at say a Google over the next because you don't sue a skidrow bum you sue somebody's lot of money and uh I think it's going to be very interesting to watch as these new startups come up without a lot IP who are using lots of intellectual property whether it be advertising uh uh algorithms or bid ask algorithms all kinds of technology and there's there's there's been there's been a patent on just about everything on the planet uh that you can possibly think of and anytime you go off and do a new startup I mean I think you guys in the Venture World know that that's always one of the bigger that was the first question we got asked by the venture capitalist when we took the Stanford University Network hence Sun Workstation uh idea forward to the venture capitalist is they wanted to know that we had free and clear IP access from Stanford uh so that they so Stanford wouldn't come back and and want to hang a royalty on on our product and thanksfully Stanford S A leted said that that was the case that was free and clear and we've been very generous back to Stanford because of uh of the way they treated us this is sud Bry a lifetime son family member this question is for Bill and venod uh if you were running the company today what would do differently than what Scott's been doing I'll let Bill answer that one that's you know it's really hard to put yourself in somebody else's shoes with a different set of circumstances that you don't deal you know most of what you do is a function of what you deal with dayto day it's very hard to sit outside and strategize it's pretty easy doing Monday morning quarterbacking but it's much harder when you're sort of trying to make real time decisions so it's an unfair question do you ask either me a bill no didn't I go in and I literally sit down with the node once every 90 to 180 days and say what am I doing wrong and he is not at all bashful he's just being very very nice I don't get a chance to well snag him as often I think um over the what 20 years we worked together I think there were a number of times where I wanted to abandon an old idea before Scott did so Scott Scott's more tenacious sometimes he was right sometimes he was wrong but you know when you're the CTO of a company you can suggest a a 90 degree turn and I suggested one a 1995 to the board with Java in the in the web um and that was Scott took it up immediately there were other times I suggested making changes that I F the ecl one for a while and it turned out to be we finally killed the ecl machine and that was just huge we did did a we were trying to do a high-end machine we in an old technology um cuz I thought it was easy to build a machine in an old technology than to build parallel software which was probably the right decision at the time then then about a year or two later I wanted us to do only multiprocessor desktops which I think would have been a good thing to do sooner you know but uh it it's hard either you do all multiprocessor or nobody assumes it's there and you don't get any software for it so I think it's fair to say so but he was a steadying hand but but I I would have cancelled more of the older things sooner but it may not have been the right thing for the business in the short to intermediate term not in the long term it's an open question could have worked either way I I all three of these folks have an open door to come tell me what to do all four of them John's never bashful either he doesn't buy email because he doesn't want me to scream back at him so yes uh and I have a almost philosophical question uh about the role and place of inventors in this world because inventors try to make this world simpler easier faster but uh the work of an inventor is not that kind of easy simple fast thing so creating the world that is different from what they do themselves do they work themselves out of the system do they become loners do they cut so to say the change the society in the way that it becomes uh not their kind of society and if it happens can do something with that yeah I accuse our Engineers all the time of being the kind of Engineers who go out and buy 10-speed bicycles and pay extra to have them unassembled cuz it's all about putting the bike together and change they run over Nails just so that they can change the tire and uh you know that's so so the Innovative Spirit versus what the user has always been a great tension I know it's son and I know bill was always trying to make things simpler uh the person said you know I'm sorry for the length of this letter was I didn't have enough time to make it short is is really all about the Innovative spirit it's easy to put it together and get it to work but then to make it simple small comp Andy is is another one who drives that kind of Simplicity it's very very hard to make things simpler because you know transistors are getting really cheap and bites of memory are really cheap so the the natural tendency of things is to get bigger and bigger and fill up the available memory and the available transistors so it's it takes constant effort to make things simpler so what is the pathway for an inventor does the inventor call up venod and say I've got a great idea fundme well your schedules are so call me first then you can call the venture capitalist they usually they send they send email because we don't check our voicemail nearly as often all right yes question hi I'm Shannon M um I'm a son groupy and a partner um just real quick too uh I I've never had a television well not since 1972 And um there are actually more households in the world with um televisions than indoor plumbing that's not I want to say we are talking about privacy um and ubiquity and how there's no privacy anymore but I thought that um there's actually a good opportunity for sun today um to really talk more about how they secure the network and how you can secure um the world today because you built you build in security and everything you do and yet if you look on a list of companies you don't see Sun anywhere listed uh as a as a security company and I think that there's that might be an opportunity um that some could could look at today and there are also two big sorry two huge Microsoft um folks in the third row that they just left they're very influential Microsoft were they feeling insecure well this issue take Shannon's question at the broadest level can we Design Systems that are secure from the bottom up from the from the iron up we don't have them today why you talk about how you and James worked on the security model for Java I think that was core um well who are you securing the system from I think you know if I think about it uh one of my great discoveries over Christmas was I found this scanner this Fujitsu made the scanner has anyone seen at the scan snap that you stick a stack of pages in it's a size of a loaf of bread you stick it on your desk and it scans Pages through 15 sheets a minute double-sided into PDF okay so I mean you know lawyers do this for years but I can take all that information all all the paper files in my office I can scan it in almost at point of I have one in my kitchen so I can take the incoming bills and scan them and and send email them to people to tell them to deal with it or so whatever you know or things I don't like you know the point is that then that information is in electronic on my notebook computer which is the dis is encrypted right so my briefcase is in the trunk of my car but if you break into my car and steal my notebook computer you haven't stolen anything that's not encrypted so so I mean there are ways to steal you break into the server room where the discs are but you know that's a big advance to be able to have security because my you know it's much more secure than Scott you say your mailbox or people can just take the paper so I think I think but you know you have to define the system parameters for security and unless you define them you can't solve you can't solve the problem but for me that's a big Advance just just getting rid of the pap paper that I can leave in the airport you know that's how bad do you feel when you leave something confidential accidentally in you know the men's room something well Whit diffy's here and Whit when public key encryption was first invented when Whit invented public key encryption there was a thought that finally we had a mechanism a tool that would allow everything on the network to be protected but in reality the emails you guys send each other aren't encrypted probably but a lot of e-commerce is transacted with those works perfectly fine in fact you know I would say the internet is more much more secure than people believe it is or there's some perceptions un secure that you can use those mechanisms in have perfectly secure kind of environments should we should ask quit yeah but so in the in this explosion of of network utility computing the world where everyone is using the network as the foundation for everything that they do are we completely vulnerable able somewhat vulnerable I think people confuse Microsoft viruses with you know a security prom which they are but that's not something we can solve where did they go now that we need them the third yes last question question hi I'm Steve heler and I work at Sun Micro Systems if any of you have a role model that's not sitting on stage I was wondering if you could tell us who that is and why well um let let me give you at least a couple of examples that I've always looked to um to me ever since I was 15 or 16 uh the founding of intel was just sort of this great role model and over the years you've gotten to know the company and and look at what somebody like Andy Grove has done it's sort of a very competitive very aggressive company with sort of a very clear sense of values in the company great management great style great values and and a real commitment to what you believe in at the other end not on the other end on the value Spectrum but sort of a completely different kind of person is a guy like Steve Jobs who passionately religiously believes his own ideas and no matter what anybody else says he's going to push them through and I believe that's fundamentally why he's been successful he has religious belief in his ideas just because everybody says hey let's be compatible with the PC or whatever he doesn't do it he decides what he believes and follows it through with a passion and I think that's another very different type of role model um Larry Elon had the same sort of religious belief system and I think those are ingredients that are key to success so well beyond beyond my co-founders here I've always two people I've admired John who's moderating the panel and uh another John John door who are now getting a chance to work with I said that publicly more than a decade ago so as embarrassing as it may be to John so who's your Ro role moding oh it's Bill o thean I actually always was a big fan of um Einstein because you know to me he represents this kind of person who could think so clearly without even doing the experiment that he was right almost all the time except for Quantum stuff but it was just amazing how consistent he could look at the world Scott did you have a I don't have a good answer I me I don't really well on that note before we came up here Scott said the biggest technical advance in the last year that I think is important is your driver I have ping driver how much did it add to 15 yards that's [Music] cool [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] w

Channel: Computer History Museum

Views: 32,112

Keywords: Computer, History, Museum, Sun, Microsystems, Silicon, Valley, Stanford, University, UC, Berkeley, McNealy, Bechtolsheim, Bill, Joy, Vinod, Khosla, UNIX, JAVA, servers, sparc, sparcstation, Oracle

Id: dkmzb904tG0

Length: 130min 34sec (7834 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 07 2010