X
Business

Sun's Schwartz@Syndicate: Intranets are gonna die

Today, the second and last day of the Syndicate Conference in San Francisco, the event kicked off with Doc Searls doing a keynote interview of Sun president and COO Jonathan Schwartz.  As an experiment in live blogging, kind of like stuffing IRC into a blog, I'm going to populate this blog entry with nothing but some of Schwartz's more interesting quotes.
Written by David Berlind, Inactive

Today, the second and last day of the Syndicate Conference in San Francisco, the event kicked off with Doc Searls doing a keynote interview of Sun president and COO Jonathan Schwartz.  As an experiment in live blogging, kind of like stuffing IRC into a blog, I'm going to populate this blog entry with nothing but some of Schwartz's more interesting quotes.  As each quote comes, I'll just update the blog.

  • Regarding whether or not Sun has internal-only as well as external blogs: " There's very little communication internal to Sun that you want to have private.... I just have an external blog."
  • Regarding Sun's liberal work at home policy: "If you work from home for Sun, you're likelihood to leave Sun is about zero."
  • Regarding giving employees the sort of connectivity that allows them to shop online while at work: "Some people say that if you allow people some conveniences or allow them some connectivity, it will be bad for business.  My fear is that when you give connectivity to your employees, they take [their work] home all the time."
  • Why Sun has so many blogs: "Blogging has played an enormous part in the revitalization of Sun's reputation."
  • On the future of Intranets: "Intranets are an anachronism. They're gonna die, it's just a matter of time."
  • How the SPARC architecture go to last week's announcements (the Niagara chips and the T1000/T2000): "Three years ago, we tore SPARC down to the studs."
  • Why open source the SPARC design: "The reason that we're doing this is to ensure that anybody -- BSD or Linux -- can run natively with extraordinary performance."
  • Regarding transparency at Sun: "I could not sit in front of you and say transparency is important at Sun and then have a ghost-writer write my blog."
  • Can Vonage phones that work over the WiFi network work as well cell phones: "It's just time.  Quality of service will improve over time.  It won't be perfect.  But [it's not perfect with the current system either]."
  • Will the walled gardens being set up by the telcos survive? "My view with carriers in general.. that say I'm going to give you a walled garden for your phone... consumers will leave [those carriers]."
  • "Google's toolbar will run on any operating system as opposed to Yahoo, which says that if you want to run the Yahoo toolbar, you have to download Internet Explorer."
  • "The more diversity and choice there is in the world, the more you need standards so everybody can connect to them."
  • Regarding DRM: "The question is what is fair use?  How do you enforce fair use?  If I'm going to provide a critique of something -- that's fair use.  That's why fair use was in part set up.  Anybody that says I'm not going to trust your answer [to the question of whether or not you are going to use their content fairly or not]... in the long run, you're going to lose interest in their content."
  • In response to Shel Israel's question on how the the Sun/Google relationship will benefit consumers: "I can't give you a road map for the Sun-Google relationship"
  • On the intersection of Web 2.0 and Office applications (not an exact quote): "OpenOffice is simply another network client. Being able to just save to the cloud, using WebDav, is the direction that we're heading.  If it's not in there now, I can take you back to Sun and show it to you."
Editorial standards