Customer Ecosystems

The Net is the Computer?

When Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems presciently said that the network is the computer, he knew that the Internet was going to shift the way people thought about the box on their desks. Sadly for Sun, he was right. Schwartz, the new CEO of the high-tech computer hardware company (McNealy just stepped down), is laying off people in unprecedented numbers. (You can link to the story here.)

The reason that the network is the computer is simple. We get the most value from things we don't know. The stuff on our computers is stuff we know (or at least know about). When we have that "moment of truth" when we really need to know something to make a decision, we rely on external information. (Ping me if you want to see the research on this.)

So any company that makes the search for external information seamless, fast and useful is bound to have more potential marketability than companies that sell boxes on desks. The boxes become a commodity. It's the nature of the knowledge we get through connectivity to a digital network that creates value.

So, Sun is down. And Google, famously, is up. And, ironically, some of Google's new efforts with Ajax include software derived from Sun Microsystems. The J in Ajax stands for JavaScript, a simple version of Sun's Java language. Sun has made its mark. Perhaps that mark will ultimately be just a fingerprint on the side of Google's rocketship.

But now that you have a sense for why we're looking upward not at the sun but at the search engine, you can ask yourself: How am I helping my stakeholders and customers make better decisions with information they don't currently have? The answer to that question could well keep your company from becoming a black hole.