Tech Update: What exactly is a big friggin' WebTone switch?
McNealy: If you're a service provider and you want to provide telephone services, you go out and buy a big friggin' dial tone switch and you buy it all complete. You buy the whole thing and you don't get IBM Global Services in there to integrate it for you. You buy it complete from Nortel or Alcatel or Lucent and they install it and they turn it over for production, and it has dial tone, call forwarding, call waiting, voice messaging, caller ID, all of those different features. You can go to Sun and buy a big friggin' WebTone switch. That is the server, the storage, the operating system, the monitoring software, the clustering, the alternate pathing, multiple domaining, dynamic reconfiguration--and then it has a mail tone, a calendar tone, a news tone, an app server tone, and a directory tone. It has all of the different features of a big freaking WebTone switch and allows you to create this big jukebox. You can buy that all complete. Or you have one throat to choke and you can buy it all through a service provider that is SunTone certified. Or you can do what many IT directors do and they go out and buy the telephone switch by buying the chip from Intel, the operating system from Microsoft, the disk drive from EMC, the Compaq power supply, the Oracle database, the Novell directory, the BEA app server, the SAP, ERP, and CRM from here, blah-blah-blah, this, that, and the other thing, a SoundBlaster card from somebody else, the anti-virus uninstaller from Norton, and then go bring in IBM Global Services to try to make the whole thing work. Buy the big freaking WebTone switch.
I spend two billion dollars a year in R&D to go and make this whole integrated stack work in a highly reliable 99.99% to 99.999% [availability], scalable SPARC Solaris SunONE architecture. There is no reason CIOs need to duplicate all of that work. You have got plenty to do creating your directory and plugging all of your legacy CDs, cassettes, jukeboxes, DVDs, and all the rest of it into this digital jukebox.
Tech Update: Selling a whole platform traditionally meant providing the platform, recruiting the developers, and finding partners. Now, Microsoft is using a fourth rule and it seems to be working: creating IDs. IDs that once they're transactional, the technology on which they're based is difficult if not impossible to disintermediate. Passport, Hotmail, MSN Messenger--these are all killer apps that are creating transactional IDs for .NET. Java appears to be the only competitor, and many of your partners, extremely large companies, have deployed one version or another of client-side Java. They're optimistic, but none has told me what the killer Java app is. So what's the killer app that will result in transactional IDs that will prevent client-side Java's disintermediation and build even more momentum for all versions of Java?
McNealy: I agree with everything that the question implies. There are really only two developer bases left. Multimillion developer bases, there's the d-d-dot NOT--d-d-dot NET--environment and then there's SunOne, which is SPARC, Solaris, Java, Jini, iPlanet and Forte, and all of the Web protocols that are out there that are multi-vendor and open. You can write to one architecture or the other. There are obviously big differences between them in terms of scalability from SmartCards to supercomputers with Sun One, [and] open interfaces. But most importantly, we won't compete with you in the SunOne architecture. Service providers get to be service providers and they get to own their own IDs, they get to be their own service providers. Microsoft becomes a service provider and the ID provider, and the platform provider, all wrapped up into one. That's not a good thing. It's very anti-competitive, very choice reducing, and very threatening as your question argues. So Java is part of the SunOne platform, and it is an API for writing executable content. ID capture, we have addressed with a different issue. For ID capture, we argue that the right way to do it is through the Liberty directory architecture. Liberty is a group of 34 companies today going to literally thousands of people who are going to use a common schema and single sign-on architecture for how you create a digital on-line presence and identification environment. So companies can maintain and control and keep track of their own customer, supplier, and employee databases--not have a third party disintermediate them, which is what .NET is all about.
Tech Update: So you're implying that the transactional IDs are already in place and it's just a matter of hooking them up to Liberty's authentication scheme?
McNealy: Getting them all to have a common schema so that you can share. It turns out that companies like General Motors and like Vodafone and all the rest of it have a billion plus IDs already. You know, Microsoft talked about 200 million IDs through .NET. Most of those are what we call teenagers working in chat rooms and are not real serious, money-paying IDs. When you look at Vodafone, they've got hundreds of millions of customers who they bill for real money every month and have a real digital ID and a relationship, a voluntary relationship that sends Vodafone money. These are very powerful IDs, and Liberty gets them all to do a common schema in a common single sign-on environment so that they can do bilateral business relationships on a conditional access basis where they protect each other's businesses and partnerships and identifications. Liberty is going to be a very, very successful strategy. What DNS was for the Web, the Liberty architecture is going to be for on-line presence and ID.
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