Rob Gingell

Rob Gingell is accustomed to herding cats.

He has spent much of his 17-year career at Sun Microsystems trying to get the other technology gurus at the company to follow his lead. As the chief technologist for Sun's system software group, Gingell ran herd on Solaris, Java, and the entire portfolio of servers and development tools. Four months ago he was appointed Sun's chief engineer, and now is responsible for crafting a cohesive strategy as Sun moves from it first-generation systems based on Unix to a second generation oriented around Java.

Gingell talks about his desire to open source Solaris and intermarry it with Linux. He also discusses his focus on other parts of the software stack, especially Java, and why he believes that Sun will succeed at time when Solaris and SPARC are no longer the company's crown jewels.

Get an inside look at Sun's strategy in this final installment of our two-part interview with Gingell. Click here for part one of this interview.

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Tech Update: You've said that the future of Sun is more about Java than the somewhat commoditized hardware and software that Sun sells. How do you build an ecosystem for Java?

Rob Gingell: [Gingell draws a circle with three planets on an orbital path: developers, volume, and applications] For platform suppliers like Sun, this ecosystem defines life. As you get developers, they generate applications that [platform suppliers] must mine to produce volume. It's a positive feedback loop that works when it's going up and when it's going down.

Digital had to buy apps to cause them to appear there [points to the "applications" planet] because the volume wasn't sufficient; that's how you knew that Alpha wasn't going to matter. As soon as you see anybody having to artificially prop up one part of the [ecosystem], it's all over. That's a tragedy, right? Digital was always great at doing beautiful instruction sets from an aesthetics standpoint. It's a real tragedy in some way.

Tech Update: You're not the first person to tell me this. Over the years I've heard developers talk about Digital products like Alpha and StrongARM, and how it was like breathing pure oxygen.

Gingell: Some of it was the culture at that company, but everybody has heard about technologically superior failures. It's not enough to be wonderful in that one dimension. You have to figure out how you work within the ecology.

When I say we're working on our second-generation systems, our first generation was about practicing this loop with Unix. We have anywhere from 300,000 to a million people operating in this space [points to the "developer" planet]. The Solaris applications catalog is essentially 100 percent of any Unix applications [points to "apps" planet] that exists. You can't find Unix applications that aren't available on Solaris. Out of that potential energy, we achieved a 40 percent market share [points to "volume" planet], and that's what we do to drive our revenue.

When we talk about the next generation, we're just talking about another instance of this circle that's based on Java, where the developer number is already at three million. The apps space is only beginning to appear in some areas like your Java phone. There are various obstacles to being successful that we haven't worked through yet. Certainly, some fraction of our server business is being run by this [Java ecosystem] to the extent that it's driven by application servers. All of our initiatives around things labeled SunOne are really about translating that into market share [points to "volume" planet] for us so that we can start to see this develop into a self-sustaining ecosystem.

Tech Update: How difficult will it be for Sun to shift gears?

Gingell: The potential energy for this is just phenomenal compared to the previous edition [of Unix], just based on the number of developers alone. The challenge is, does Sun reapply its business model to this different collection of technologies or does it do what most hardware companies do by following their technologies into commoditization?

That's where the 17 years of business experience comes in. When I got to Sun, we didn't make our own chips. We used the Berkeley operating system, made changes, and sent them back. They ate some of them and didn't eat others. We put them back in when they sent us the next tape, and it was all about building the system and not about having those things.

In that sense, I've always viewed things like Solaris and SPARC as tactics in this larger strategy of integration. There isn't any other story that has this same starting point that you can find that we've already created out of Java. The question is, are the individual primates that make up Sun so wedded to the technologies they've been laboring away on for twenty years that they can't actually see the forest that they're part of?

Humans hate change. They hate disruption. All institutions act to suppress it. This is a case where we need people to pick up their heads and say, "I'm a chip designer. I can actually design any chips. Not just SPARC chips. I design chips that go inside systems and do other things. I can do other sorts of things. I am an operating system builder and I know about OS technologies. What I really know about is computation and computing in general."

The company that can harness all of those skills is potentially a much richer source of product possibilities than a company that can only do software or can only do chips or can only do one of the other things.

Historically, we've lived on the notion that innovation lives elsewhere, and no matter how big or successful you are, the total number of smarter people is greater than you somewhere else. That's why we were always offering away some of our value-added technologies, from NFS on down. Every Unix in the world runs almost all of the crap that's in Solaris that's architecturally important. The thing they don't run are the specific code changes we've made in the last two years. Even if we let everyone look at our source all the time, it will still be true that the real advantage we have is our capacity for doing that kind of work, not the residue of the work that we've already finished. We don't pay our programmers for the code they've already written. We pay them for the code they haven't written yet. That's really the value to us.

It's what they're going to create. Not what they've already created which does have value to us, but it's a lot like movies. The first day a movie ships, it's worth eight bucks a shot. But a couple of weeks from now, it's four bucks a shot and two years from now you'll be watching it free on television. Or maybe just a year if it didn't get that much of a box office draw. A lot of the code itself is a "What have you done for me lately?" kind of asset. It's the capacity to make the code that's really valuable.

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