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Here's the Deal — Sun and Google
In early October, Sun and Google announced a joint agreement to make it easier for customers to obtain the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), the Google Toolbar, and the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite.
Scott McNealy
This is a fairly natural partnership so it shouldn't surprise people that we're back together. This announcement brings the free Internet services and search company of all time, Google, together with the #1 player in the free and open software space.
Sun got started by taking the open source Berkeley software distribution and creating Sun OS back in 1982 before people even talked about open source licenses and open source software. Eric in fact shepherded the Sun OS, which became Solaris, and also shepherded Java out of the lab. So there's a long history behind this.
Sun is working on creating a free, open, readily available "Network is the Computer" network services environment, so it is natural for our two companies to come together. This movement started back with Bill Joy at Berkeley, with Network File System (NFS), with TCP/IP, Solaris community development, and the Java Community Process, but it has accelerated. Governments are now getting into the act — South America, the European Commission, and more recently, the state of Massachusetts signed up for the open document format for productivity tools and presentation environments.
So here's what we're trying to do with this announcement. A long time ago Sun was pretty hot, then the bubble burst and we've been retooling and restrategizing since then. We made an aggressive push to take back Wall Street and have been quite successful. In the fiscal year that ended in June, we were growing again in Wall Street and have done a very effective job in winning back big Solaris deployments and getting the applications and technology capture in a very key market. We're doing the same with service providers — our big market in the telco and cable space.
Another goal was to take back the Web. We were the "dot" in dot com if you'll remember, and we want to take that back. We've made some good progress with "software as services" companies like salesforce.com, eBay, etc., but what better way to make a statement than to partner with the leader in Web services — Google. We're doing that with open strategies, with our hot new Opteron servers, and we're driving key technologies into what we call Web 2.0 with OpenSolaris, Java, the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), and OpenOffice/StarOffice technologies.
The numbers are pretty fantastic — it's now a $100 billion+ market. There are 20 million downloads of the JRE every month. There are 2.5 billion Java-enabled devices, 700 million Java-enabled desktops, over 700 million Java phones, over 1 billion Java smart cards. There are 913 JCP partners, including Google, which has been a JCP member for awhile and is leading a couple of the Java Specification Requests (JSRs) in the development community for the JCP. We're pushing Solaris technology — we've open sourced that and now have over 2.8 million download registrations with about two-thirds of those to the x86/x64 industry-standard platform since February. It has opened up a whole new market for OpenSolaris and Solaris 10. You'll continue to see that grow aggressively. And then on top of that there is OpenOffice.org which has about 52 million OpenOffice/StarOffice downloads, registrations, and purchases on a worldwide basis in 20 languages.
This announcement is about leveraging the network economics and those downloads, so we are announcing a very strategic partnership to promote the JRE and the Google toolbar. This will leverage the desktop Java environment and provide a wonderful synergistic opportunity for the two companies.
If you think back, there's an interesting analogy. What Netscape did for the JRE, we believe the JRE can do for the Google toolbar. The HTML browser and the JRE supercharged each other and we believe the toolbar and the JRE can do that. As we add OpenSolaris and OpenOffice technologies to the environment we think this can be a big deal. I read that there are 80 million unique users per month on the Google site. That's a pretty staggering number. There's a huge alignment strategically, with joint R&D, partnering on open document formats, partnering on OpenOffice and OpenSolaris, and truly making the "Network the Computer."
Eric Schmidt
This whole agreement is a natural progression. I worked for Scott for 14 years and what I learned from him, besides a lot about hockey, was leadership. People always forget the hard times. I remember what it took when the company was at this or that point, especially when it was small. I witnessed real leadership and I have modeled my own life around this leadership. The accomplishments that Scott has led the company to show the kind of tenacity that real leadership requires.
From a technology perspective, this is a natural next story. Twenty-five years ago, Bill Joy and others at Berkeley invented a set of technologies roughly extending UNIX that Scott and his colleagues at Sun, myself included, promoted into an open systems/open standards world. This at the time was an anathema — no one understood it. Scott would rail about the importance of interoperability and standard platforms at a time when no one wanted to hear the message. In the '80s, this was the great message of Sun. In the early '90s, when the web was invented and TCP/IP, interoperability, and open data really began to occur, a natural transformation occurred and all the people who had been listening to Scott and his vision began to implement what we now see as the open, interoperable Web.
Java at the same time turned out to be the ideal programming environment for such an open platform. Today, I work with many young people who assume this is how it has always been, but it wasn't. It wasn't even true five years ago, let alone 10 years ago, that you could do what you can do now. Scott understood what we saw in the Java opportunity and made it a multiplatform strategy. That's the cycle of leadership I see out of Sun all the time.
So then Google comes along and builds on top of this. We took for granted all the hard work from people at Sun and we built the next layer — the next set of services on top. We take for granted interoperability, Web services, etc. We build the applications that people will use. This is a natural next step. The Google toolbar will be downloaded by tens of millions of people as a result of this partnership. The toolbar provides real end-user value and this deal provides us a new set of users. From a business perspective it also gives us an opportunity around additional monetization with advertising.
As for the success and scale of Java — to think that 10 years ago when this came out it would be so far along with so many different users and so fundamentally embedded in every fabric of daily life — it's incredible. That's what is so impressive about what the Java team has accomplished. Google uses Java all over the place, so it's a natural extension. In addition to the toolbar work, we're going to continue our broad endorsement of open standards and open source and help Sun in numerous ways to make that happen. We're already a Sun systems company and we're going to increase that quite significantly.
From my perspective, if you understand the history, you understand the role that so many people played to get us to this point. We so easily forget how hard it was to get here and what a tremendous accomplishment it is. This understanding helps you to respect the architecture and strength of the underlying platforms and brands.
These things are timeless and will be with us for a very long time. Java will continue in its broad march to change the way people do computing and use information across networks and devices. Scott talked about this earlier with multiplatform. It started here, with the people in this room, and it's not done yet. That's why this is so exciting.
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