This morning's interview between the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg and Sun's CEO....
Notes are drastically paraphrased....
Q: What is Sun's Policy agenda:
A: Getting as many people online as possible.
Q: From a policy perspective, how do you go about this?
A: Washington needs to be educated in the role of tech as a social utility. First and foremost, government needs to develop standards for making sure that as many users can access the network as possible.
Electricity and the network have a lot in common.
There is no longer much of a global power divide. Govt. drove standards.
Need to make the network affordable and open.
Since there is a lot more competition on the network, there doesn't need to be regulation. Just standards.
Q: Does there need to be federal broadband policy?
A: Countries with federal broadband policies have more broadband. We should be more circumspect about what we aren't doing that they are. But, we don't necessarily need a specific broadband policy that mandates technologies.
I am a big believer in government setting standards and following them. We have building codes; we should have networking codes.
Q: What about Sun's green policy?
A: Electricity is one of the biggest expenses for tech companies. For basic competitive realties it makes sense for us to focus on energy efficiencies. This is borne true by PG&E subsidizing the installation of our servers because it saves money and energy?
We are tremendously inefficient at consuming power at home. This might have relatively small effects on individual consumers. But, for big companies this a is a huge deal. We need 90% to 100% utilization of power.
(And, here JS referenced a weekend blog post on this issue).
We are building busses of the networking world. We can move lots of things at the same time. We need to be able to parallelize the work.
Q: How about government policy and your blog?
The SEC has yet to see the Internet as doing as good as a job as things like PR Newswire as parsing material information.
We should look to the Internet as a way to fulfill RegFD
Q: How many CEOs have blogs?
A: I don't follow this, but probably not many.
Q: Did your lawyers have a heart attack when you started your blog?
A: No, not really, and our investors liked it as a way to get more information.
Q: How much time do you spend on the blog?
A: It fills a lot of the void -- the white space in may day.
Q: As a company, what are you doing to focus on energy efficiency?
A: What are we not doing? Everything we do is focused on energy efficiency.
An example: Tape for storage doesn't require as much energy. I could FedEx large amounts of data on tape from San Francisco to Beijing for less energy than using the network to make the transfer.
Q: How do we make smart efficiency decisions?
A: Make tech benefits/limits transparent. The govt. has a productive role in making sure that we measure the efficiencies of the data center.
My description of Walt Mossberg during this conversation: irascible, but likeable. He can definitely stir it up, but always with a goal of getting interesting information for his readers/audience.
I've always been impressed with Schwartz and while he may have a ponytail and John Lennon glasses, don't let his appearance fool you...he's a pragmatic, thoughtful, very smart guy.
Posted by: John Earnhardt | February 26, 2007 at 04:51 PM