http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5879292.html?tag=zdfd.newsfeed
Sun president: PCs are so yesterday
By Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: September 23, 2005, 3:06 PM PT
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ZDNet Tags: Personal computers Internet Mobile/wireless Desktops
Innovation Sun Microsystems Inc Microsoft Corp Yahoo! Inc Google
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SAN JOSE, Calif.--Increasingly, the personal computer is a relic.
So asserted Jonathan Schwartz, president of server and software maker
Sun Microsystems. Instead, what has become important are Web services
on the Internet and the mobile phones most will use to access them,
he argued at a Friday speech here at a meeting of the American India
Foundation.
"The majority of the applications that will drive the next wave of
innovation will be services, not applications that run on the
desktop. The real innovation is occurring in the network and the
network services," Schwartz said.
Sun, which sells the back-end infrastructure that powers such
services, has promulgated variations of this message for years. But
there's evidence the idea has some merit.
Schwartz points to the increasing wealth and power of companies, like
eBay, Google, Yahoo and Amazon.com, that profit from free services
available over the network. Among his audience, many more people said
they'd rather have access to Internet services than their desktop
computing applications. And Microsoft--the company with the biggest
financial stake in the PC software business--has struggled to cope
with the arrival of Web services.
The threat to PCs is twofold. Not only are services moving to the
network, Schwartz said, but PCs won't be the way people use those
services--particularly in poorer areas of the world that have risen
higher up Sun's corporate priority list. Instead, that access will
come through mobile phones.
"The majority of the world will first experience the Internet through
their handset," Schwartz said.
When it comes to aiding developing regions' digital development, "Our
collective generation believes the desktop PC is the most important
thing to give to people. I don't buy that. The most important thing
to give is access to the Internet."
Since Schwartz became Sun's president last year, the company has
touted a campaign to bridge the digital divide, for example by
promoting freely available open-source software such as
OpenOffice.org. Schwartz doesn't pretend his company's motives are
altruistic, though.
"Clearly it's in my company's best interest to have 50 million people
in sub-Saharan Africa join the network," Schwartz said.
But he does argue that there's more to be gained from pervasive
network access than just a restoration of Sun's financial health and
improvement to its stagnant stock price. The network also helps bring
value to society, he said.
"The Internet has clearly become, as electricity and railroads did
before it, a social utility," Schwartz said.
One case in point was visible with the online classified ad site
Craigslist during the effort to cope with the Katrina hurricane that
devastated states on the Gulf Coast. And he expects more with the
approach of the next storm, Rita.
"The Internet--and one organization in particular called Craigslist--
played an absolutely central role to recovery efforts," Schwartz
said. "While the Federal Emergency Management Agency was stumbling
and trying to figure out how to present its information, Craigslist
was providing a connection vehicle for people who wanted to find
their friends, their family members, their pets."
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