The Network Is the Company

For one thing -- and this is only a slight overstatement -- you can fire your vice president of marketing. The Internet style is to put something up and let other people examine it -- no hype, no hoopla, no advertising unless it's substantive. That style is the basis of Java's success. We didn't make a big announcement. There were no tents, no spotlights, no celebrity endorsements. We put up the Web page http://java.sun.com and invited people to visit. They could read about Java, download code, and make up their own minds. And lots of people do. Our Java page gets 1.5 million hits per day.

It's no-obligation marketing. And it creates a different kind of customer, a much more committed customer.

Most people view this "download-for-free" model as a way to build market share and establish a standard. We'll give it away first, dominate later. You see it differently?

What you're really trying to do is harness the collective brainpower of the Net in the service of your product. The old idea was that the only people who could help you invent new things were people inside your company. On the Net, you can invoke the talents of people worldwide, 24 hours a day, who are doing it out of love -- doing it just to do it. You don't have to know their names; they're on the Net. You don't have to pay them; they're on the Net. They work all the time; they're on the Net all the time.

The Net doesn't let you do away with your vice president of engineering, but it does change the job. The VP of engineering becomes a conductor and an explorer who looks for advanced work around the world and how to incorporate it into your product.

The Net becomes the foundation for a vast acceleration in product development. It's the goal of the new fast company: instant communication with people you've never met, to create something of value that becomes the heart of a business.

It's an alluring model -- and one that few companies have adopted. What's stopping more companies from competing this way?

The network style isn't for everybody. People who are over 40 and grew up in companies where proprietary information is a big deal go crazy. You're going to post internal product documentation on the Web? What if our competitors, the enemy, get their hands on it? Which of course they will.

But there's value in talking with the enemy. The more information you get, and the more quickly you get it, the more likely you are to adapt and survive. It's like accelerating the evolutionary cycle. There are no real secrets. Speed is the only form of security.

Are there times when Sun doesn't walk its talk when it comes to living on the Net?

One of these days I plan to add a new feature to my personal home page: a Hall of Shame. The first inductees will be some senior people who proposed in 1994 that Sun charge $50 per month to any employee who wanted to use the Mosaic Web browser. It's always the same objections -- capacity and security. They claimed that Web browsers were a huge source of viruses and extremely dangerous to the Sun network. It was ridiculous.

Did the proposal go through?

There was a grassroots revolt. I happened to be in Germany, at the Hannover trade fair, the night the message went out announcing the policy. I'm in Sun's booth drinking beer with a hundred Germans. The e-mail comes across people's machines and there's this huge uproar. So the Germans start sending e-mail to Mountain View saying, "I can't believe this." The messages startled people here, because they didn't realize where they were being written. That's another thing with e-mail. You get a bunch of angry messages from people and you think they're sitting calmly in their offices. You don't realize they're on the floor of Hannover Fair, drunk, with the Sun rock-and-roll band playing behind them. This movement from Germany started a series of flames, and the company backed off -- you know, "Upon further reflection..."

Are there other sources of resistance?

Many HR people, including ours, are terrified by these ideas. Just try finding a phone book at Sun. Impossible! Why? "Headhunters will come after our best people."

That whole attitude misses the point. People assume that if someone leaves the company, they're no longer part of the company, that it won't benefit from their ideas. The network model says that's wrong. Patrick Naughton was one of the early leaders of the project that became Java. In 1994 he went to Seattle to join Starwave, the sports-information and entertainment company owned by [Microsoft cofounder] Paul Allen http://www.starwave.com . Patrick championed Java at Starwave. One of the reasons Microsoft adopted Java is because Naughton's group showed how Java could create something powerful.

Business is in a struggle: Who speaks for the company? Is it always the CEO? I don't think so. Sun stands for the collection of talent we've assembled; lots of people speak for Sun. The power -- and terror -- of the Net is that it lets them reach a huge global audience.

We are a multifaceted human organism attempting to explain ourselves to other people. Suddenly, our explanations, which sometimes conflict, don't reach one person, they reach 30 million people. It makes lots of people nervous. To me it's the best thing that could happen.

Richard Rapaport (rjrap@aol.com) is a writer based in San Francisco. His articles appear regularly in "Wired", "Forbes ASAP", and other publications.

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