Commodity Computing

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has a very nice post about not only his company's new, ultra fast chip, but two radical shifts to his company's business model. It's very well done.

So when we announce (via this webcast) the fastest microprocessor the industry's ever seen (the benchmarks are staggering) - and say we're entering the "commodity microprocessor market," what does it really mean? It means we're no longer limiting ourselves to serving an internal market, inside Sun. Instead, we're opening ourselves up to the broadest market possible - where the opportunity's largest.

Despite having what's arguably the single biggest competitive advantage our systems business has ever had, we've separated out our microelectronics business - and told them to win on the open market, as well. ....

....To add fuel to the fire, the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2 (I personally like the moniker, "Niagara 2" - named after Niagara Falls, btw, and the great volumes of water that pass over them), the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL. Making Niagara 2 the only commodity silicon whose core designs are available to the open source community - whose strength, and market power, only grows by the day.

These are all huge changes to our business. Driven by a simple philosophy: the open market is bigger than any internal one. But ultimately, why now? A simple reason: because customers building infrastructure for the internet have been asking us to do so.

• Posted by John Battelle at 6:09 AM
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SAI: MySpace and Ads

This is very interesting, an interview with the head of revenue at MySpace.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:45 PM
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The Internet Ad Universe - Bigger Than Newspapers In Four Years

So says a report from Veronis Suhler. 2011 is the year, the firm claims, for Net ad revenues to surpass newspaper revenues. I am certain it will happen faster.

• Posted by John Battelle at 8:09 AM
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Accoona IPO

Accoona, a search engine and, apparently, an ecommerce business, has filed for an IPO, Paid Content alerts us.

To my mind, this smells like opportunism, after all, the search engine has gotten very little traction and the company has no profits. That's the kind of IPO that got us into trouble last time. The offering is dressed in a Google like auction process to boot. So I took a quick look at the S1. It's clear from first blush, this is not a search company. Sure, they have a search engine, but what revenues they have they seem to have purchased - and they are all ecommerce sites. And while the S1 speaks of six sites that provide its revenues, I can't find them listed anywhere. I'll keep looking, but if you all can find em, let us know.

Acconna is also playing the "China is hot" card by playing up a deal with the China Daily Information Company.

Furthermore, the company is losing a lot of money, and seems on track to lose a lot more. They lost $50 million last year, and lost nearly $15 million in the first quarter of this year.

More from the S1:

We are an Internet company engaged in three primary business lines — online-based lead generation, online search in the United States, Europe and China, and e-commerce consumer electronics retailing. Our services assist our users in finding the products, services and information they want, obtaining competitive pricing and making informed buying decisions. We use our expertise in technology, marketing and management to support and create efficiencies across our business lines, which are organized primarily into the following sectors:
• Online-based lead generation — We developed and operate ExchangePlaceTM, which we believe is one of the first U.S. online-based marketplaces that enables consumers to obtain offers from as many as four providers of services in which they are interested and allows providers to bid for the opportunity to contact qualified consumers, or leads, (i.e., those meeting the providers’ criteria), across a range of vertical markets. We believe that these leads are more valuable to providers because of the greater likelihood they will result in sales, thereby resulting in increased returns on investment, or ROI, for those providers.
• Search — We have developed and operate an artificial intelligence driven search engine in the United States, China and Europe. Our business plan contemplates the development of techniques to use our existing technologies to enable our users to better access certain specialized search markets. In addition, we operate a shopping comparison search engine, BuyersEdge.com, that allows shoppers to search for and compare products and prices available at numerous online merchants.
• E-commerce — We operate six Internet retail websites offering primarily a wide selection of consumer electronics and home appliances, backed by customer service and support. According to a report in TWICE, in 2006, the combined revenues of our e-commerce sites made us one of the top 10 consumer-direct electronics retailers in North America by online revenue and one of the top 55 consumer electronics retailers overall.

Update: Silicon Alley Insider goes a bit deeper. Ouch.

• Posted by John Battelle at 11:58 PM
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Hadoop

I must have been under a rock, because I missed the news that Doug Cutting (of Lucene and Nutch fame) is now at Yahoo, and working on supporting Hadoop, which is "a software platform lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data."

Tim covers this well, writing:

...why is Yahoo!'s involvement so important? First, it indicates a kind of competitive tipping point in Web 2.0, where a large company that is a strong #2 in a space (search) realizes that open source is a great competitive weapon against their dominant competitor. It's very much the same reason why IBM got behind Eclipse, as a way of getting competitive advantage against Sun in the Java market. (If you thought they were doing it out of the goodness of their hearts rather than clear-sighted business logic, think again.) If Yahoo! is realizing that open source is an important part of their competitive strategy, you can be sure that other big Web 2.0 companies will follow.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:41 PM
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