Why Sun Should Have Followed Apple’s Path

These days you don’t read or hear too much about companies deploying Sun Servers or workstations, you don’t read about the great advances in the Sparc Architecture, and you don’t read about how Solaris is powering the newest supercomputer. All of the things are what you would have routinely heard about ten years ago and through end of the dot com boom. Back then Sun was the platform of choice for enterprise computing and powering the latest web startups. Many a dotcom blew their VC funds on top of the line Sun servers to power their new next greatest thing. However, Sun has languished in light of cheap, but powerful, x86 and x64 hardware running Linux, which has virtually eliminated any advantages that Sun once had with their Sparc Servers and Workstations.

With their advantages dwindling Sun decided that they should jump on the mainstream bandwagon, by saying that they support Linux, building x64 servers, Open Sourcing Solaris, and buying MySQL. However all of these efforts seemed to be half-hearted measures to allow them to say they were doing these things, to get people in the door to talk to them about their Sparc closed source Solaris systems. They went so far as to start selling x64 workstations that ran, *GASP*, Windows.

Had Sun really supported these efforts they would have stopped selling a commercial version of Solaris and embraced a highly optimized, user friendly, custom version of Linux as their OS of choice that could run on any device they made. Furthermore, they would have limited their Sparc SKUs to the extremely high-end systems with everything else running x64. Finally, they would have embraced the consumer with gateway products to build their brand and suck new customers in, while building a hedge against market fluctuations. Does this strategy sound familiar? It should, its exactly what Apple did to not only maintain relevancy, but steal significant market share from Dell, HP, IBM, and Microsoft.

In Many ways Sun could have been bigger than Apple because they already had enterprise products, they just needed a consumer strategy, which albeit is much more difficult to create than an enterprise strategy. They could have accomplished this through an acquisition several years ago of a company like Suse, HTC, Creative Labs, or Macromedia. Anyone of these companies or any number of others could have vaulted Sun into the consumer space or have given them the tools to build really innovative consumer and enterprise level products.

Cisco, another dotcom high-flyer saw the writing on the wall about a dwindling enterprise market. This prompted them to make some strategic acquisitions to enter the consumer and small business space with Linksys and WebEx, among others. While not exactly the same, since Cisco does not make Workstations or Servers (at least until this week they did not), it is similar, they continued to serve their core market while bolstering their consumer offerings as a hedge against the separate market fluctuations.

But alas, they did not and in today’s news is that Sun is in talks to be acquired by IBM for nearly $7 Billion. However, I do not view this as bad news for either company because there are great synergies in products between the two companies. It is also not too late for IBM to still embrace a consumer strategy and get back into the workstation and laptop market that they should have never left.

Goodbye GrandCentral, Hello Google Voice!

In a blog post late tonight on the official Google Blog is details of how Google is shaking off the dust that has settled on GrandCentral, the service they acquired way back in July 2007. GrandCentral provides users with voice features traditionally associated with business IP PBXs, such as a single virtual phone number that rings to multiple of your other phone numbers such as home, work, mobile, call screening, and web accessible voicemail. The free service is wildly popular with its existing users, but has languished since the Google acquisition and subsequent termination of new account signups.

According to the Blog post Google is planning a relaunch of the service under the Google Voice moniker. Along with the relaunch it looks like they will be adding some killer features, such as voicemail transcription, low-priced international calls, integration with Goog-411, and archival/indexing of all of your SMS messages. This all comes delivered on a new Google-ized user interface. The voicemail transcription is particularly interesting considering that there are existing services our there that charge a fee and use a human to transcribe your messages and send them to you.

Google has promised to roll out the service first to existing GrandCentral users in the next few days, and then to allow sign ups for new users. In fact if you point your web browser to http://voice.google.com you are greeted by a traditional Google looking login page, except it is branded for the new service. However, despite the fact that the homepage says Google Voice is open for GrandCentral, it is not, you are greeted by a Server Error after attempting to login, and the Learn More link at the bottom of the page takes you to non-existent Google Support pages.

As a current GrandCentral User, I am stoked about this news, as I was fearing that Google was going to let the service die much as it did with Dodgeball. I will update this blog post as I hear more.

Zimbra has 40 Million Paid Mailboxes

Venture Beat is reporting that Yahoo’s Zimbra has 40 Million Paid Email boxes, which is gives it more paid mailboxes than Google’s Free Gmail and it’s paying Apps (Gmail) For Your Domain customers, and puts it close behind AOL and Microsoft’s Hotmail services. While Zimbra’s users are not the same type of users as Gmail, AOL, and Hotmail’s users, in that Zimbra is not offering basic web mail services like the aforementioned services, they are offering something more significant in a full Groupware system with Calendaring, Email, Contacts, etc., and they are getting companies to pay for it, whereas the others, not so much. Much of Zimbra’s new found user base is due to the fact that Comcast has deployed Zimbra as it’s new email system for all of it’s broadband subscribers.

While Zimbra has made significant headway in aquiring new customers, they still have a lot to do to compete with Microsoft Exchange, with their biggest hurdle being acceptance by non-technical “office-type” users of using their own web mail interface over the traditional Outlook Interface. I ran into this head on when I replaced our existing Exchange 2003 Server with Zimbra. While the system was fairly stable, but less so than our Exchange server, their Desktop Connectors that linked with Outlook, Entourage, Apple Mail, and Apple iCal left much to be desired. These connectors were down right buggy and feature incomplete. With that said, if you can get your users to use their Zimbra Desktop Client or Web Client, the system was rock solid, and their Connector for Active Sync worked flawlessly.

I hope this milestone gets them noticed within the Yahoo corporate structure and gets them some more resources so that they do not get lost in the current Yahoo re org mess. I am still not convinced that Yahoo’s acquisition of Zimbra was a good move for either of the companies. As I have said before I still think that Apple should have bought Zimbra instead of creating their iCal Server.

It should be noted that I own stock in Yahoo.

Google Sync, Killing MS Exchange One Beta At a Time

Today Google launched their new Google Sync Product that allows you to sync your Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts to your Windows Mobile and iPhone devices. To do this they have licensed Microsoft’s Activesync protocol, just as Apple did to allow the iPhone to sync to a Microsoft Exchange server.
This is significant because it immediately opens up the majority of existing smart phone owners to functionality previously only offered to corporate users of Exchange servers, at no cost. Which makes the service ideal for smaller companies and Independent Consultant/Freelancer types. What is even more ideal about the service for these types of people is that it also works with Google Apps for your Domain. Can you say free Exchange Server?

The second reason that this is significant is that it virtually negates the need for Apple’s MobileMe service, as it provides virtually the same functionality at no cost. I am sure Apple is not pleased about this.

As great as this service is, there are some downsides:

-The Activesync protocol only allows you to setup one Activesync account per mobile device. So if you have a Smartphone that is already syncing to your corporate Exchange server, you cannot setup another to sync to Google. This is not Google’s fault, nor is it the device manufacturer’s fault, this is the way Microsoft designed Activesync. In many of the comments on Google’s blog posting about this new service people are laying blame at Google and Apple’s door, when it does not belong there.

-It does not use Activesync to deliver email. At this time Google is still using IMAP or POP to deliver mail to devices. This is a downside because it makes the process of getting all of your data to your device more convoluted, possibly more problem prone and bandwidth intensive.

-By using Activesync there is no way to sync Google Docs. While this may not sound significant it would be helpful to be able to sync documents and files over to your mobile device. This is functionality that Microsoft will be making available shortly through their Live Mesh service that is currently in beta.

-It does not sync Tasks. One of the core functions of any personal information management system is the ability to create and organize tasks. Activesync already has functionality to sync tasks from an Exchange-based account natively, but Google has not implemented functionality to sync your Gmail tasks as of yet.

-It does not work on Google’s own G1 Android phone. While it appears that Google has licensed Activesync for pushing data to mobile devices from its services, it has not implemented Activesync on the Android platform, which means that Android users are out in the cold on this one.

None of the downsides listed are deal breakers in my mind for the average user, and following in the grand Google tradition of release then iterate, I am sure that they will be able to work through many of these issues in short order.