Gingell: Right. In some ways, that's really what Linux is. It's the cost reduction commoditizing of Unix over cheap volume-produced hardware enabled by the PC marketplace. Part of the answer to that is that if everybody is invested in Java Virtual Machines, then they are not invested in SPARC. But neither are they invested in Intel or in any chip-based instruction set. That's a device that is to the system of 2002 the way resistors were to the systems in 1982.

If you stand back from the Unix industry, you'll notice that the apps space has leveled off for many years. People may be doing revisions of things that already exist, but you don't hear about a lot of new applications. Linux is having a lot of growth primarily because it's just the existing apps moving over. Somebody issues a press release that says, "I did that port." There are thirty years of Unix history for Linux to catch up on and once it's caught up on it, then what? All that activity is taking place somewhere else. It's occurring in this networked environment rather than in the boxed-space environment.

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t.

Some of those devices may differ, however. For example, some chips allow you to build low-power devices that run at a certain price point or go at certain speeds. Or, they may consume a lot of power, but they give you the ability to have a really haul-ass, vertically scaled database processing thing. What's valuable to us is that we have one-eighth of the world's CPU designers, not the instructions that they work on.

It's the fact that when I build a data residence device that some people might call storage, I can have processors, ASICs, and my own systems software in it. [At Sun] I have all those skills to build the perfect data residence device or something that fits the market definition of such a device. Let's just deliver the software components with the things that are needed to power them so I don't have engineering arguments with people saying, "Well, this management agent has a footprint that's too big." Why don't we just deliver the hardware with the management agent so we don't have to worry about it? Well, we can make the chips and the software and all that stuff, so, we can actually do that! Right? Nobody else can do that. That turns out to be a pretty useful value proposition to a lot of customers.

We're not telling people to delete it and we're not saying to rewrite all their Unix apps in Java or anything. In fact we expect that world to just sort of surf along at whatever level it's at.

Read the Part II of this exclusive Tech Update Unplugged interview.

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