Sun Adopts RSS

Schwartz: There's a broad scale realization within Sun Microsystems that communities are increasingly informed through RSS. My CTO John Fowler commanded a portion of my staff meeting away from my agenda to have a parade of those who manage RSS communities in Sun come in and talk to me and my staff about the extent to which this is an extremely powerful mechanism of getting information and creating communities.

Sun Microsystems has always been about communities. Those communities early on in the company's existence were probably nowhere near as well connected as they are today, certainly in nowhere near the same real-time mechanism as they are today. And RSS is increasingly becoming the principal means of real-time communication.

If you look now all across Sun and our developer properties, you're seeing RSS feeds –little blogs and wikis– popping up everywhere. That to me is more representative of what needs to be our mainstream strategy rather than the work of a few creative individuals who want to have our big admin portal picked up by people who care about Solaris system administration.

So we're having a recent discussion at Scott's staff meeting about where we put our advertising and marketing dollars. We could run big SuperBowl [spots] or maybe advertise during the Academy Awards. And my point was, those won't reach our target demographic. RSS will reach our target demographic.

Gillmor: How do you invest in RSS?

Schwartz: We invest in a couple of ways: One, we build the basic infrastructure into all the services that Sun provides just to insure they're available as RSS feeds. That's pretty standard infrastructure —there's nothing there that's going to be world-changing. The second inevitable conclusion is you've got to support it in the client, and through the client. Whether that's Ampheta or ChatZilla or any of the diversity of client technologies that are available, we're obviously still thinking through that.

There's preferences from guys who run Macs and JDS (Java Desktop System) and Windows —everybody's got their favorite. We've got to figure out what the right cross-platform answer really is. There may in fact be no right cross platform answer. It may be that RSS is sufficiently standardized (apropos of the prior conversation) that we can have a diversity of clients available to read it, including RSS clients on my handset, on my set top box, and in my hotel room.

Next page: RSS in the Java Desktop System?

Gillmor: How does that filter down to the Java Desktop System?

Schwartz: JDS is not necessarily about providing every choice. What you would pay Sun for isn't to assemble a bunch of open source code and give it to you on a disk. What you come to Sun for is: Give me an assembled, qualified, integrated stack that I can rely upon your roadmap to deploy.

When we make conclusions about what is the RSS infrastructure within that desktop, that's probably going to be more significant than almost anything else, even though the volume there isn't anywhere near what it is on a cell phone. We don't control all the definition of the software stack on a cell phone like we do on JDS. We obviously have to play close attention to how it is we put the infrastructure in place —and it also means that we're gonna put the infrastructure in place.

Gillmor: You mentioned earlier that Microsoft is holding RSS back for some reason. What is that reason?

Schwartz: It's a couple of things. One, the RSS market is relatively nascent. And there are some technology leaders who are going to go deliver their RSS feeds more proactively than others. Is Microsoft missing a huge market right now? Probably not. But it just goes to the prior point that he who controls distribution controls the definition of the standard.

On one hand, I think they're uncomfortable with how much of the RSS standards have been done in the open source community that they can't therefore lock away. And if they take a path, they have to take one that breaks that alliance, and in breaking that alliance –as they've tried to do with HTTP, Java, and every technology they couldn't control– lies some risk for Microsoft. I'm not sure right now they're all that interested or focused on it. I think Steve Ballmer is probably more focused on his pricing in Malaysia than he is on the infrastructure for RSS.

Gillmor: But this is an opportunity with JDS for you to make that effectively the center of the desktop, as opposed to a messaging client.

Author: Steve Gillmor

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