Are you trying to get in front of the train in Web services?
We're the locomotive. Think about it. They're all written to Java. The only issue there is the adoption of XML. Were we late to the game? Yeah. But now we're driving it. JAX-RPC is a standard we created. Am I worried about SOAP and UDDI? Not in the least. N1 is under your purview. How much of N1 is a software design?
N1 is all software. The idea behind N1 is simple. If you run lots and lots of low-end systems, you need to worry about provisioning and management that you didn't (have to worry about) when all you ran was one E15K (Sun's top-end 72-processor server). All we're doing is taking the technology in an E15K and repurposing it for 2,000 Netra T1s and x86 blades. When is the vision of N1 coming to reality, when you can manage an entire data center the way you manage a single server today?
It'll take years to deliver. We've got 25,000 systems under remote management and monitoring. We are about to ship iChange in the next release of Solaris. So there are elements of it today. N1 is very much the banner under which this stuff will be aligned. You talk about lots of software "sedimenting" to become part of the operating system. Do you think databases are going to become bundled as a standard feature of the operating system?
Stay tuned. What does that mean? You're interested?
Oh, sure. I think it's a huge competitive opportunity. How would Sun go about having a significant presence in the database market?
Have you noticed we already ship MySQL on Linux and Solaris? What I've heard back from customers is that (IBM's database) DB2 is outrageously expensive and (IBM's e-commerce software) WebSphere is 50,000 bucks (per) CPU. Our value proposition to them is, "Why on earth did you pay 50,000 bucks a CPU for WebSphere when you can get a free Application Server 7.0 from Sun running on Solaris and Linux -- and by the way, we'll give you a database as well? Why do you bother with DB2 on Linux? Why don't you just run MySQL? It's cheaper, faster and more stable ..." I was just at Google, and Google's an all-MySQL shop. Why did they do it? Because they looked at DB2 and it was expensive and it didn't offer any added value. I haven't noticed a very rich independent software community living on top of MySQL the way one has on Oracle.
Go check it out. I don't think they have to be in the (high-end) data center business to be interesting to us. Are you concerned that Oracle, one of Sun's biggest partners, is pitching a competitor?
If you want to use Oracle, by all means, please do. I think the issue Oracle faces is they're trying desperately to embrace Linux, and Oracle's "unbreakable Linux" (pitch) certainly makes a statement. My retort would be unbreakable MySQL.