The Suite Spot
Grabbing A Bite: Radical Vision
Jonathan Schwartz has already settled on the rotisserie chicken when he arrives at Zibibbo, a sunny Palo Alto, Calif., eatery. Why waste time reading a menu when he can talk about what he really wants? Which is nothing less than the transformation of the computing business into the world's newest power utility.
At 39, with ponytail and wire-framed glasses, Schwartz could easily pass for a spruced-up code jockey rather than the president of Sun Microsystems. Certainly, his vision is as radical as any hacker's. Sun built its business selling hardware and software for custom data centers. But Schwartz is promoting a new business model, where companies stop building their own networks and turn to Sun for "utility computing" --an on-demand service like buying electricity from the power company.
Sun has started rolling out a series of products, including a service that lets companies use computing power at $1 per processing hour. It is not Schwartz's first counterintuitive move. As head of Sun's software division, he doubled investment in the Solaris operating system just as competitors were abandoning their own. He increased support for Sun's Java programming language and encouraged Sun to make Solaris free.
Schwartz knows the new strategy might alienate traditional customers. But, he says, "most electricians probably opposed the rise of the grid and utility companies." That didn't slow down GE. Now if only the analogy holds true for Sun.
Book Nook: Potheads and PCs
An early line in What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry sums up the book and signals it's a worthy read: Apple Computer cofounder Steve Jobs says taking the hallucinogenic drug LSD was one of the most important things he has ever done and those who have not tripped on acid can not fully understand him.
So John Markoff, a New York Times reporter, convincingly explains how the unique California experience of the 1960s--particularly drugs and protests--led to the personal computer, the Internet, and the open-source movement. The heroics here include Douglas Engelbart's human "augmenting" machine and Fred Moore's populist Homebrew Computer Club that spurred early work on PC s. Before their ilk, East Coast-bred mainframes had dominated the industry.
A host of names, relationships, and institutions make the book a bit of a slog at times. But it's spiced with fun detail--such as Engelbart's PC mouse taking its name from being chased by an early computer cursor called the "CAT."
This story appears in the May 23, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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