What's the Matter With Sun?

The second thing that Sun must do is to cease the stupid sloganeering. "We Are the Dot in Dotcom" was a disastrous corporate mantra -- and not because the dotcoms blew up. It was self-serving and self-important. The key to any business is client focus. That is why Sun's previous slogan (before they went off on the "dot in the dotcom" tangent), "The Network Is the Computer," didn't work either. It wasn't client focused, and, even worse, it sounded like New Age drivel.

What should Sun be saying? The best line that I've heard so far came from, of all people, former House speaker Newt Gingrich. He was talking about large information-technology companies and what they need to say to their customers. Gingrich said, "The line should be, The Answer to Complexity Is (Your Company's Name Here)."

Complexity is what tears up virtually every large corporate, governmental, and institutional organization. They have all of this information technology that's not integrated. The machines don't talk to each other, and the wireless stuff isn't even plugged in. On and on it goes. The information-technology company that can fix that -- that can harmonize all of the elements into a fully functional whole -- will be the one that wins.

Sun could be that company. It has embraced open architecture, which is a huge strategic advantage. It is creating the platform, called JXTA, that will enable every device to talk to every other device across a fully distributed computing network, thus enabling a true peer-to-peer computing environment. In theory at least, a true peer-to-peer computing environment means that every last bit of CPU power can be used as needed and every bit of storage capability can be made available.

Because of Bill Joy, Sun's chief scientist, and the hundreds of Sun engineers and open-source code writers, JXTA is up and running. Of course, the selling of Sun's servers will go on, but that alone is not the future of the company. The future of the company is servers and code.

As it so happens, Sun is greatly needed by a very large and important client: the federal government. Most people would be stunned by the lack of compatibility and the absence of interoperability that exists within the federal government's information-technology systems. Before September 11, we could afford to view this situation as horribly inefficient but hardly critical. And the fact that the FBI computers couldn't talk to the CIA computers was reassuring in a kind of paranoid way.

But it was positively frightening that after September 11, Mohammed Atta got his visa from the INS in part because its computers were not compatible with the FBI's and the CIA's systems. Thanks to JXTA, that problem might be solved quickly and efficiently. Other companies can use Sun's technology to develop applications that could check every airline passenger and every credit-card transaction against terrorist watch lists and that could monitor every bad guy each time he makes a move.

Sun needs to fix a big problem for a big client in order to reestablish itself as the Toyota of information technology. The company is close to doing a deal with the federal government. It should focus all of its energies on that enterprise -- and make us all safer as part of the deal. If it can do that, then all of those Sun-setting stories will disappear.

The truth is, in a distributed computing world, the computers are the network. And making sense of that -- by answering that complexity -- is Sun's real mission.

John Ellis (jellis@fastcompany.com) is a writer and consultant based in New York.