Return to Supernova 2008.

Presenters:

• Case Study: Reconstructing IT

  Jonathan Schwartz (Sun Microsystems)

• Spotlight on Social Computing

  Joe Kraus (Google)

• Spotlight on Mobility and Wireless

  Ozzie Diaz (HP)

Notes:

* Jonathan Schwartz (Sun Microsystems)

- If the cost of acquiring a customer were zero, how many customers would you acquire?  Marginal cost of adding a customer, today, is very low.

- data storage is very inefficent, expensive. Sun began trying to figure out how to change that (people want a cheap reliable platform -- how can this be done). Developed something called ZFS spent a lot of money doing that but, in 2005, gave it away -- not just the product but also the source code. In 2006-2007 built a piece of data center infrastructure called Thumper.  Thumper was picked up and used very quickly. In part, because they had developed and spread the software that then ran on it.  This reduced the marginal cost of adding a customer.

- (hard to think about how this is used in np context -- maybe it's giving people things first before asking for $ support or...? Help me in the commets)

- exchange for registering has be very clear.  But then you get good information. So this helps if you are "selling" a hardware product (because you are creating a tiered services + demand) but how does it work in other kinds of services? 

- a developer community around the product is valuable because they are passionate and become evangelists

- just because you aren't selling your product doesn't mean that you can't care about what your customers want.  ZFS -- if it doesn't get used and is popular, Sun would not see a benefit.

- change requires highlighting "leading lights" or success stories. It's a slow process who accelerates.

- Q. How do you know what data you should collect?  A. Schwartz: Collect everything you can.  You never know what you will need in the future.  Or a partner will need.  And be open about what you are collecting.  Because the day you are shown as being not transparent, great negative consquences will be visited upon you.

- You must own your own intellectual property to control where you go in the future.

- Cost of acquiring a customer is zero often requires a painful restructuring process but there is no choice.

- 110M active Open Office users.  Got those users through a free office productivity software.  What happens next is open but the cost of acquiring this customer is zero (so a phone that helps with this?)

* Joe Kraus (Google)

- social networking just the latest and most efficient way of connecting and sharing (but we've doing that for a while)

- search is becoming more social.  Use status message (away message on IM services, for example) to solicit help searching and finding things.

- publish then filter -- people on the receiving end can worry about whether to or not.  Friendfeed is an example of this.  It's sort of a passive sharing platform.

- previously, we generated user content on sites.  User generated content is a concept -- it's routinely expected that people can be a part of the conversation.  Will this change hit social?  There aren't social sites but it is a part of our activity on the web.

- (this seems a much better version of what happened w/ Beacon -- a sort of permission-based sharing.)

- Problems: * aggregate/federate identity, how do you give permission, how do you help sites be social? 

- Solutions: OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial

- Google helping via Friend Connect

* Ozzie Diaz (HP)

- going form CPU based experience to cloud-based experience. 

- Blurring of lines between digital and real lives -- location dependence is also blurring this