Yesterday afternoon I met Sun Microsystems’ Chairman and Co-Founder Scott McNealy at an event that the Potomac Officers Club sponsored at the Tysons Corner Ritz Carlton. Scott was delivering a terrific speech in which I learned a lot of interesting facts about Sun’s open source initiatives. As Chairman of the company who coined the phrase “The network is the computer” his prediction continues to be fascinating, especially with Sun’s focus on Open Source software initiatives
To start off, Scott gave a very funny Top 10 list: “How the IT world is like our lovable Government and Washington establishment”. (Several of these were LOL for me!) A few of my favorites:
- Each has a different plan for Security
- Both are huge cost centers with creative budget practices
- Both are trying to secure our ports
- Both invented the Internet
- Both generate a log of “hot air”
- Source code and Legislation are equally unreadable and buggy
- Random misuse of power from the Mayflower Hotel to the Datacenter
Scott talked about the world today with millions of new users of the internet, over 10 billion videos watched on the internet on a regular basis and the internet’s impact of disintermediation of traditional revenue producing business models:
- E-bay and Craigslist– disrupts the media business and want-ads revenue stream
- Amazon.com disrupts the book/publishing business and becomes the worlds electronic card catalogue
- Youtube is disinter mediating TV with their videos
- Curriki is creating the new online coarse curriculum displacing scholastic books which we spend $4.3 Billion annually.
