Sun CTO Predicts Internet Consolidation Endgame 167
Romerican writes "C|Net is running an interview with Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun Microsystems, about the Very Near Future where he essential sees the Internet as no longer competitive. He has blogged his belief that the end game is here and nothing is likely to unseat the new world order." From the C|Net article: "It's called software as a service. It really is the running of what we think of as IT through the network. You don't buy software, you buy the consequence of the software. That starts with the small and medium enterprises. eBay, in my mind, is the leading example of small businesses being absorbed by services. Anybody who clicks their store on eBay is in fact consuming a service. They are contributing to a larger-scale eBay rather than them buying some server and sticking it on their desk."
Re:i like the server in my server room (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I would never rent software I used at home. But then, I would never lease a car either. I hear many people, and especially corporations, do lease cars if it makes financial sense for them. I imagine leased software would make sense in some situations, too. Think about it: you have a little startup and you want a nice integrated CRM, HR and accounting package. You can shell out $100,000 upfront for the package with the functionality you want and still pay $1,000/month in support, or you can lease the package, support included, for $2,000 per month. Which would you pick?
Will leased software ever completely replace owned software, as this Sun wingnut predicts? In his greedy wet dreams, maybe. But it will become a larger part of the total software landscape than it is now.
Re:Erm ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wishful thinking? (Score:3, Interesting)
However, in the corporate world it's a bit different. The box on a shelf model of purchasing software doesn't apply so much. We purchase software and then pay for it yearly under expensive maintenance contracts. After years of using a software package, it becomes extremely difficult to even think about switching to another program and migrating data, re-implementing customizations, training, etc.
Even simpler software is moving to this model. Take Microsoft Office, which is no longer upgradeable by open license customers. In order to receive upgrade benefits, we have to purchase Software Assurance, which puts us in an interesting bind: right now we use Microsoft Office, but will we switch in the next three years? Maybe we will, but if we don't, then we will eventually wind up purchasing new licenses at full price. Thus if moving to a new office suite isn't a huge priority in the organization, it makes more sense to just pay the SA with the assumption that you'll still want MS Office and want to "save" some money. Customer lock-in. (I also wouldn't necessarily consider office suites to be simple these days either; when you've got tens of thousands of documents of all sorts, all created by Software X, it becomes harder and harder to justify switching)
So these companies supplying software to businesses already have a continuous revenue stream.
What I see holding back this software as a service thing in the present and near future is:
1) Yes there are potential cost savings after what could be a massive expenditure in moving to the new service. But do we really care enough to disrupt the current system? Is the reduction in IT overhead that significant? Over what timeline? Do we trust that technology won't change significantly during that timeline and not at all jive with our expectations? And just how portable do we need to be?
2) Do the applications work as well as local applications? Is the user experience equal or better? I've never seen this to be the case, but I can't predict the future. What happens when I *don't* want to upgrade the software features?
3) Customizing software is a common thing; yes, even in the non-opensource world. What happens when I want to add a feature, or a customized report (with or without the reporting tool provided by the software)? What happens when I want to link this application's data to that application? Am I provided these mechanisms?
4) We've all done the leased server and collocation thing. How'd that work out compared to admining your local servers? Nobody likes that out of control feeling.
4.1) We know what our in-house servers are doing. We can see them. We know what's on them. We know our internal network topology. We can maintain that, and would have to regardless. We get alarmed when something is wrong. We are confident that we can fix it without screwing anything up. We are completely responsible for all data and applications, and can choose exactly how they should work in the organization.
So IMO much of this depends on the quality of the software service, and how similar it is to a local deployment. If it isn't some web-based thing, or some Java-based thing, and the users and IT staff can both have the same power over the software as they previously had, then yay. I suppose if the applications just shot down the pipe to your machine when you wanted them, then it could work great... but why add the pipe into the mix of crap that can go wrong? Is it really that difficult to deploy and update software? I don't personally think so.
The views expressed in the article seem to have a very narrow scope. Some of them are valid for retail/online business, definitely. What about businesses that have absolutely nothing in co