Google buying SUN
First, pundits like to post, or talk about (Fox news. We report. You Cringe) explosive things. Google buying SUN is one of them. Its based on Mcneely might resign (don't we all one day?), and he is selling shares.
www.digg.com has it as a highly dugg (voted for) article yesterday. Its exciting, but not realistic at all.
I am pretty plugged in, via personal contacts and work, to both companies. It won't happen. And the best reason has not been posted yet, Google uses a ton of java and needs it to stay alive. Lucky for google, or Sun realized it, java is open source, so google can in-house it if they need to. As can the rest of us. So they won't buy Sun for that.
Another good reason would be to keep secrecy high, and secure thier supply chain of opteron motherboards. But they can do that and not aqquire sun, and actually keep sun more viable as a customer.
Once they buy Sun, "sun the hardware vendor" is now trying to sell hardware to lots of google competitors. Not going to happen.
Google has realized that the cost of computing is going down (and bandwidth) while the revenue per advert (superbowl ad or mouse click thru) has not. They are exploiting those two curves.
Recall the old days when "Mutual of omaha" would air (as would lots of other shows) - NBC did not produce it, they ran it for the priviledge of running 3 of the adverts during each break. The producers (Mutual of omaha) ran the 1 advert and paid for the show.
Thats where google is headed. They will serve up the content for a portion of the ad revenue. Right now its a large partion, but that will change.
Content is free if they can monetize your eyeballs looking at it. Which is why the RIAA ruckus will die down as the music industry figures out how to show me ads as I download MP3s and organize them. Which is why cable and satellite TV service will be free, and broadband keeps getting cheaper with scale.
Here's to google, they get it. And since they use java, they don't need a specific OS or hardware vendor to stay alive to keep thier money printing machine running. Same for my company. We have applications that have been selling for over 30 years, and we are tired of re-writing them everytime MSFT uses rolling obsolesnce to crank revenue. So we are cutting the depencency cord. Have been for years.
I don't mind companies monetizing things. I do mind them monetizing, and leveraging, sheer dependency - thats not value add. MSFT had better move fast.
www.digg.com has it as a highly dugg (voted for) article yesterday. Its exciting, but not realistic at all.
I am pretty plugged in, via personal contacts and work, to both companies. It won't happen. And the best reason has not been posted yet, Google uses a ton of java and needs it to stay alive. Lucky for google, or Sun realized it, java is open source, so google can in-house it if they need to. As can the rest of us. So they won't buy Sun for that.
Another good reason would be to keep secrecy high, and secure thier supply chain of opteron motherboards. But they can do that and not aqquire sun, and actually keep sun more viable as a customer.
Once they buy Sun, "sun the hardware vendor" is now trying to sell hardware to lots of google competitors. Not going to happen.
Google has realized that the cost of computing is going down (and bandwidth) while the revenue per advert (superbowl ad or mouse click thru) has not. They are exploiting those two curves.
Recall the old days when "Mutual of omaha" would air (as would lots of other shows) - NBC did not produce it, they ran it for the priviledge of running 3 of the adverts during each break. The producers (Mutual of omaha) ran the 1 advert and paid for the show.
Thats where google is headed. They will serve up the content for a portion of the ad revenue. Right now its a large partion, but that will change.
Content is free if they can monetize your eyeballs looking at it. Which is why the RIAA ruckus will die down as the music industry figures out how to show me ads as I download MP3s and organize them. Which is why cable and satellite TV service will be free, and broadband keeps getting cheaper with scale.
Here's to google, they get it. And since they use java, they don't need a specific OS or hardware vendor to stay alive to keep thier money printing machine running. Same for my company. We have applications that have been selling for over 30 years, and we are tired of re-writing them everytime MSFT uses rolling obsolesnce to crank revenue. So we are cutting the depencency cord. Have been for years.
I don't mind companies monetizing things. I do mind them monetizing, and leveraging, sheer dependency - thats not value add. MSFT had better move fast.
Excellent analysis. At best I see Google licensing certain technology from Sun and perhaps buying some machines, nothing more.
The business models of the 2 companies could not be more different. Sun's attempts to monetize a compute utility have a long way to go before they actually convert their business model to something more annuity based like Google's.
As you said, Google gets it.