The Network Is the Company

John Gage is holding court at one of his favorite haunts, the Espresso Roma Cafe in Berkeley, California. With laptop and latte, he's spinning scenarios about the future of the Internet and marveling at the explosive growth of Sun Microsystems, the company he's been part of since its earliest days nearly 15 years ago.

Gage's official title at Sun is director of the science office, but most everyone refers to him as the company's "chief scientist." It's a role that leaves him less and less time for latte. Gage, 53, logs 1 million air miles per year in his role as techno-troubadour and scientific ambassador. He compares notes with Russian supercomputer designers; keeps in touch with officials at the ultrasecret National Security Agency (an early and still-important Sun customer); swaps ideas with software nerds in Japan; reviews product strategies with hard-nosed executives at Sun's Mountain View, California headquarters. His most important job, he says, is "keeping the smartest people at Sun thinking, talking, and working together."

At the moment, though, Gage's thoughts aren't on business. He plans to spend the evening generating more than 10,000 World Wide Web pages -- that's right, ten thousand, one for every K-12 school in California -- in connection with a nonprofit initiative called NetDay96. Gage is organizing an army of up to 100,000 volunteers to descend on the state's schools on a Saturday in March and wire them for Internet access. It's a program bold enough to be laughable. But NetDay has won the endorsement of President Clinton and captured the imagination of business leaders. "I'm a one-man organizer of a virtual company with 100,000 employees," Gage beams.

Why would a senior leader in a $6 billion enterprise choose to complicate his life with a project like NetDay? Partly to demonstrate the power of Sun's technology; this initiative simply could not exist without e-mail and the World Wide Web. The larger reason is that Gage is more than just a scientific visionary or business executive. He's a rabble rouser, an agent provocateur, a product of the 1960s who never lost his activist fire or democratic values. Gage was active in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He was a California organizer for the Robert Kennedy presidential campaign and a delegate to the 1968 Chicago convention. He coordinated the national traveling campaign for McGovern for President. "Do you remember that book, The Boys on the Bus?" Gage asks. "Well, that was my bus!"

These days, "Power to the People" sounds like the quaint rallying cry of a bygone era. But it's a way of life at young companies like Sun -- where information flows freely and people aren't afraid to express their opinions -- and in the explosion of activity around the Internet. For Gage, the Net -- and in particular, the World Wide Web -- is an electronic frontier that marries technology and democracy, the last best hope for an economy built around grassroots participation and personal expression. "The Web represents the biggest explosion in publishing and distance collaboration in history," he says. "It's the enabling mechanism for fast companies."

Where better to pursue this vision than Sun, http://www.sun.com, one of the most "connected" organizations on the planet? Its hardware products account for more than one-third of the world's Web servers. Its Java programming language is the hottest thing since the Netscape Navigator. Sun's 15,000 people generate up to 2 million e-mail messages per day. The company's 1,000 internal servers store 250,000 Web and other electronic pages. By mid-1996, all U.S. employees will be equipped with desktop videoconferencing. The ethos is simple: people should be able to communicate with anyone, anywhere, at any time, through any media imaginable.

All of which leaves John Gage thoroughly in his element. "This whole thing has a '60s flavor to it," he says. "There's a populist ethic. You don't like the news? Make some of your own. Put it on the Net."

We're here to talk about business, but at the moment one of your passions is wiring the California school system for Internet access. Does NetDay96 offer lessons for business?

NetDay is only possible because of e-mail and the Web. It has no office, no telephone number, no fax number, no paid staff. It's a totally decentralized virtual company. We don't order anyone to do anything. We give people an opportunity, and they choose whether to embrace the opportunity. People can visit our Web page, http://www.netday96.com , decide if they're interested, identify the school where they want to volunteer, tell us about their skills, and become part of the company. The best way to organize 100,000 people is to let them organize themselves.

And there's a message in there for organizing companies?