Recently I stumbled upon an
article that was somewhat surprising to me. The premise is that while we spend oodles of time making websites pretty and elegant, there’s little return on that investment.

To wit, the dating website Plenty of Fish is referenced as an “ugly” website. Now I’m not in the market for these services, but I did find the financial results compelling: $10,000 a day in ad revenue based on the community of people using the network service. So, is the website “ugly?” From a financial perspective, definitely not. People are using the service. Are they doing so in spite of the site design?

How much design is the right amount? I don’t know. But I think the differentiator here is something other than the subjective “ugly” term. I think it has to do with clarity and simplicity. Here’s a great example of the “how much design is too much design” question at work:

Microsoft Re-designs the iPod

Ugly? Or not? You decide.

One of my colleagues alerted me to a very interesting piece of technology, Wireless IP Flip-phone. It’s becoming more and more clear that traditional telcos are in BIG trouble because VOIP is a killer application, a traditional telco killer.

A great question is “Who will win the telco sweepstakes over the next five years?” I don’t know, but some of the contenders are Skype (e-Bay), Lingo, and Vonage.

How do I know it’s a killer app? The parent test. My father in particular, is technology averse. He’s never met electronic technology that he really likes or that he’d really consider, gasp, spending money on. However, he has VOIP phone service now. Why? The service quality meets his expectation and the cost is much lower than traditional telcos. Does he know he’s using VOIP? Nope. Does he care? Nope. He just wants it to be cheap and he just wants it to work.

Back to the wireless flip phone. It’ll be a long time (if ever) there is sufficient coverage to make this a replacement for mobile phones, but I can definitely see standing in a hotel lobby in Portugal at a wifi hotspot using it to phone home……

I’m not a rabid college basketball fan, but I do like March Madness, the college basketball tournament with 65 teams playing for the national championship in a single elimination format. It’s been a big deal for 30 or so years with office pools the norm.

The advent of cheap, ubiquitous network access has really sent this already popular event through the stratosphere. Consider this: There are 640,840 players in the Yahoo Pick’em ranked ahead of me in the competition, with only pride on the line, no official money. Tremendous participation.

Even though the team I picked to repeat as champion, North Carolina, was knocked out and the Ohio State Buckeyes got blown out, I remain keenly interested in the outcome. Not a great weekend for results…Here’s my pathetic bracket if you’d like to damage your retinas with poor picking.

Events like these really highlight the power of the participation age. Good news for Sun, participation drives demand for network computing infrastructure. Long live March Madness and I can’t wait for the World Cup!

For those of you not plugged into Sun’s internal org structure and missions, I lead a group that is responsible for network services exposed to our customers and partners. The internal name for this team is Customer Networked Services (CNS) and the initiative we’re working is the “Connected Customer.” Our goals are simple:

• Ensure all Sun’s technology ships connection ready and enabled
• Create the value that causes users to connect to, participate with, and purchase from Sun.

With that out of the way, we’ve reached a small, but important milestone today: we’ve got our portal deployed into the overall sun.com infrastructure. Check it out:

My Sun Connection

This is a starting point, not an ending point. You can manage your digital assets from Sun here, get interesting new Services, including Support if you’re so inclined, and try out our new tools/services in pre-release in the Fresh Tools tab. If you happen to be using Solaris 10, I encourage you to try out our patch and configuration management service, Sun Update Connection. On average, this saves administrators 4+ hours of time per server per month…..Stay tuned, more services are enroute.

Give it a whirl, tell us what you think!

The other day I had a chance to host one of our large telco customers in Sun’s Executive Briefing Center. One of my colleagues teed up the issue of measurement and behavior in a very clear and concise manner. It reminded me of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in that when something is observed, it’s changed by the very act of observation. (Note: I know this is a gross simplification of the concept, but I think it works in any case.)

The example used was far less abstract, it had to do with a realtime fuel efficiency on a car. My colleague noted that the presence of this instrumentation changed driving behavior to gain maximum fuel economy. I thought that was very interesting and salient with respect to what we can and should do with network services.

One of the concepts we’re working at present uses a telemetry stream to show actual power usage, fan speed, cpu temperature on a system or group of systems in a data center (stay tuned, it’ll show up in our Fresh Tools tab soon…) We can use this to determine some simple maintenance activities that need to happen, like filter cleaning/replacement independent of human interaction. We can also much more accurately forecast power and HVAC requirements for data centers vs. what’s actually published in the specs. The benefits of Sun’s T1 chip and T1000/T2000 systems are huge in this space and it fits right in with our Eco Computing Initiative.

Here’s the punchline: When the customer heard we could do this, he said “We’ve got a Director and team dedicated to just these tasks. What do they do once this is deployed?” I hope they get redeployed in the customer’s business to create distinct value for the end user vs. monitoring power!

Network services like these are really going to make an impact on how our customers operate their data centers.