Video Professor

The availability of high quality educational material from Universities and professionals for free has reshaped distance learning. iTunes U a branch of the popular iTunes music store grants anyone access to classes from Universities like MIT, UC Berkley, and Harvard, for free, on topic from aerospace engineering to graphic design. I personally have watched lectures from Penn St. on Investing, Harvard on building dynamic websites, and Michigan Tech on microcontrollers. The availability of this knowledge is a great resource to society and stresses the importance of expanding broadband internet access, but could education end up following a similar path to music, video, and newspapers to free?

As we have learned once technology, especially the internet, touches something it’s a race to the bottom in terms of price. This can be great for consumers but not so much for producers. In this case the producers are Universities and they are the ones potentially digging their own graves. However, I think this race to the bottom has a different set of rules since education is involved. First, I think this trend will follow what’s happening with newspapers more than anything. People have shown they enjoy being able to read timely world-class articles from newspapers all over the world, based not on their geographic location but on the merit of the contents creator. This preference lends itself to lectures and classes as well, and allows someone like me in Montana to watch lectures from Ivy League schools on the east coast.

This wide availability of free courses in many different fields is great way for people to build a latticework of models, without which, as Charlie Munger points out, you will fail in business and life. iTunes U and services like it are the ultimate pass/fail course that allows people to explore new areas, and build out their knowledge into areas that were either unavailable to them or out of reach academically.

While there is nothing out there yet that can match the college experience, which attending lectures is a small part of, it’s not unreasonable to think that in the future there may be a large number of high school grads going to school online at prestigious colleges.

Skype on the iPod

Skype on the iPod Touch makes an already useful device into a truly must have device. Skype gives the Touch the ability to make calls to cell phones, landlines, and more than 16 million active users. Besides making the Touch a much less expensive iPhone, Skype, and VoiP in general, hints at the future of mobile computing, and wireless communication.

With a simple free download to your iPod and a pair of 30 dollar headphones you can have an iPhone with out the hefty monthly price tag. Granted to make a call outside the Skype user network you need to have a monthly subscription starting at about 3 dollars a month, but overall Skype is probably the best 3 dollars you can spend on a communication service. Call quality depends on Wifi strength and speed but it is very comparable to cell phones. Besides the obvious convenience of having a mobile VoiP device, there are some cool extra features that users can leverage.

I use my Skype account in conjunction with a Skype In number to have a 406 area code number for my business. Having a 406 number instead of a 509 number may seem like a small thing, but I’ve noticed customers’ having more confidence they’re dealing with a large company instead of some kid with a cell phone. I also have it set up to forward call coming in on the Skype line to my cell phone. Which again besides the obvious convince of being able to receive calls whenever I’m not on my computer or have Skype on my Touch turned on, it sounds really advanced to customers when we say we have a phone system that automatically forwards calls to our referees when we’re in the field.

So what can VoiP, Skype, and the iPod tell us about the future of computing and communication? Well for starters before the iPod could make phone calls it was already a useful device for interacting with the web and increasingly the cloud. Devices like the iPod represent a new way of leveraging the cloud with the heavy computing done server side and the user interacting on small mobile device. Now, with the availability of VoiP and Skype on these devices you have a low cost web and communication platform that is only limited by the availably of wifi access. Which brings me to my main point, if there was a national broadband network not only would more people have access to a more necessary commodity, but also more people could use Skype and iPods to interact and communicate. This future may not be that far away with the release of the white space spectrum that the digital TV switch opened up. This spectrum’s ability to travel farther distances means that it’s becoming more cost effective and feasible to build such a network.

Ubuntu 9.04

I’m going to take a brief aside from Sun Microsystems this week and focus on anther open source development that I feel is going to shape the future of operating systems. Yesterday version 9.04 of the Linux distribution Ubuntu was released, and already one reporter from CNET is calling it "as slick and beautiful as Mac OS X or Windows 7", and I have to agree. I tried it out on my MacBook Pro and was amazed how easily it configured to my hardware and was ready to go in a matter of minutes, and best of all it's free.

Anyone interested in Ubuntu, and Linux in general, can easily try it out with a “live CD”. What a live CD does is boot your OS from your CD drive and allows you to test drive the OS before making the switch and installing it on your hard drive. Burning a live CD is pretty straight forward, you download a copy of the desktop OS, burn the .iso file to a CD, and boot your computer from the CD drive. The last part probably would be the hardest for people not used to playing with multiple OSs before. For Macs you hold down the Option key as soon as your hear the Apple "Dong" that will bring up a selection of bootable drives from which you select the CD icon with the windows label.

As soon as your computer boots into Ubuntu you'll notice the similarities between it and both Mac OS X and Windows. Ubuntu has the advantage of pulling the best features from both of these commercial OSs and mixing them into a great looking and very functional desktop. Besides looking nice Ubuntu comes loaded with enough software for the average person to be productive out of the box. Open Office, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, has a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application which are comparable to Office. Best of all your documents will be in open standards format so no more compatibly problems with the new .***x formats from Microsoft. Besides office productivity there are included apps for music, photos, and video which cover the needs of most consumer users. However, the most important application by far on Ubuntu is the Firefox internet browser, the new "killer app" of any OS.

With the emergence of the "cloud" and people interacting more and more with web apps and on demand services through the internet, the browser has become the defining piece of software of any OS. Firefox has grown to become the largest browser by usage, and gives Ubuntu and any other linux distro a way to level the playing field against Windows. People are comfortable with Firefox's interface, and while they might be confused by other parts of Ubuntu they will feel right at home for an increasing amount of their computer usage. So what does this mean? I think this is the death of the traditional OS, not in usage or necessity but in cost.

As Chris Anderson describes in Free!, "anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs". This is now happening to the OS, and since Ubuntu and the linux community has made free as high of quality as Windows or OS X there are a declining number of reasons for people not to switch. I think this trend is evident in the explosion of netbooks being sold many with a linux operating system. The increase in linux usage will create a more lucrative market for developers to create applications for linux systems bringing over more users. This with the march forward in cloud computing, SaaS, and web applications will only render the OS more insignificant. Soon as people decide between spending hundreds of dollars on upgrading to Windows 7, or Snow Leopard they may want to consider moving to Ubuntu and starting the slide into $0 operating systems.

Sun and the Cloud

Sun trademarked the phrase; The Network is the Computer, in 1984 well before the current frenzy over cloud computing had started. Their foresight of the coming shift in computing and storage from local data centers to distributed networks of virtual machines was ahead of the time, but surprisingly they have lagged behind in bringing many cloud bases products and solutions to market. Companies like Amazon already have systems in place for pay by the hour computing with their Elastic Compute Cloud, and scalable storage with Simple Storage. Although Sun may have been late to the game, they are developing some interesting new technologies that promise to give established cloud companies a run for their money.

Sun’s focus in cloud technologies is the creation of open standards that allow users to freely change systems and vendors. Cloud computing providers today lock in customers with proprietary services like storage. Sun’s vision of the future of cloud computing is an “Intercloud”, or a cloud of clouds that would connect different cloud systems into one network. This is pretty much just a reinvention of the current Internet setup but with some new technology. Sun is working to achieve this by building these standards into their products, and by releasing much of their work under Creative Commons license.

Sun has announced that this coming summer they will start a closed beta of their cloud system. This additional player in the cloud-computing arena, with their emphasis on open standards and shared technologies, will be a welcome addition. Sun has a lot of catching up to do before they can become as synonymous with cloud computing as Amazon or Google, but with enough time and community involvement they may open the cloud to a point where they all become equal.

Open Source at Sun Microsystems

This is the first post in a series of articles about open source, and more specifically, how Sun Microsystems is involved with the movement. This article will be a broad overview of how Sun views open source, how they contribute to the community, and how they integrate open source into their business model.

Sun Microsystems's commitment to open source starts at the top, with a director level position for open source held by Simon Phipps. Phipps is the Chief Open Source Officer and Director at Sun and describes his job in a recent interview with FLOSS weekly as, “trying to make sure Sun does open source in a way that is legal, decent, honest, and truthful". He goes on to say that the reason Sun finds open source so important is a topological shift in society from hub and spoke, where the people at the top controlled everything flowing to consumers, citizens, and employees, to a mesh society, brought on by the internet. This has led to a change in business interests from secrecy giving confidence and security to transparency with privacy giving confidence and security.

The outcome of this shift is the open source movement, and the communities they create. “Open source is the synchronization of the self interests of many parties”, Phipps explains, creating an environment that allows for the sharing of code takes transparency, as well as privacy in terms of one’s motivation for being involved. Sun achieves this by building communities around their products, using a mix of paid engineers and free input from the community. This achieves both transparency, with everyone involved being able to see the same code, with all it’s features, innovations, and flaws, as well as privacy by members only seeing the contributed code, without the motivation behind it.

Some of Sun’s open source projects have paid engineers contributing to them, and can be seen as direct competition to some of Sun’s business rivals. OpenOffice for example is a free, open source, office suite that competes directly with Microsoft Office. OpenSolaris is a community driven free operating system that competes with Microsoft, Apple, and Linux. This aspect of open source is detailed in Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, where companies are beginning to use open source as a way to undermine proprietary competitors. So how does Sun afford to pay engineers to contribute to projects that will ultimately be given away for free? By monetizing their products at the point where users find value, as opposed to monetizing the promise of value.

This can be done a number of different ways. Many open source projects make money by selling expertise on their product or selling a paid supported version. Paid support can grant access to 24/7 help desk support, updates, some kind of warranty, or help installing and configuring new systems. Sun builds these open source principles into their business model by offering both subscription-based versions of their products, as well as selling expertise with different services like installation or migration.

Sun Microsystems focus on open source, and community driven products has made them a leader in the open source movement. Sun has been able to benefit themselves, customers, and community member by allowing transparency with privacy, and charging only for what the end user finds valuable. This along with a shift to subscription and expertise based business model has helped them emerge as a leader in the high technology industry. Sun’s next move, and the subject of my next post, will be their push to open “the cloud”.

About Me

My journey to the University of Montana started in Pullman, WA where I was born and raised. I’m the oldest son of two clinical psychologists, so the fact that I’m one, not going to Washington State University, and two a business major often surprises people.

My first semester of college was pretty standard with your usual intro classes and freshman shenanigans. However, I happened to stumble into a wilderness EMT course, which turned out to be the first in a lucky series of choices. Besides the usual EMT curriculum the course also included more outdoors oriented training such as, using avalanche transceivers, a mass casualty scenario, and swift water rescue training. My experience with whitewater rescue led to me pursuing a job as a whitewater guide for the summer. I landed a job in Thermopolis, WY, I place I had never heard of, after a couple of emails and a phone call. Needless to say I was quite apprehensive about moving to a new place, further away from home, without ever having met the people I was about to be working for. Thankfully I continued my lucky streak of stumbling into great opportunities, as it turned out to be the best summer I’ve ever had.

Due to my EMT and lifeguard training, and experience with rowing and whitewater canoeing, thanks to the Boy Scouts, I was far ahead of the other new guides and was soon leading river trips. So there I was, getting paid to sit on the river all day, fly fishing in the evenings, living with two other guides in a rundown two-bedroom apartment, with enough time left over to make it to the bars every once in a while, it gave new meaning to “Living the Dream”.
During the time I was in Wyoming my mom decided to purchase a rental property back in Missoula. Our idea was for me to live there, manage, and improve it, which, somehow, sounded simple to me. However, in practice it was far from it. So started my biggest challenge to date, being a landlord, managing college age renters, remodeling a basement, all the while going to school. There have been varying degrees of success with the house, and while I enjoy living in my own house, there are times the dorms look pretty inviting.

The one advantage of living in a house was the fact that it had a garage. I’ve always thought of garages as the birthplace of business, with stories of Apple, Hewlett Packard, and closer to home Schweitzer Engineering, all starting in that manner. So I decided to do the same and start my own business Grizzly Paintball LLC. Not only was this an opportunity to possibly make some money, but also gave me a good way to apply what I was learning in school. As it turned out I really had no need for the garage part of the business until I had customers and equipment, so instead it turned into completely web based business. This is where the power of the web really became clear to me.

Within 24 hours of registering my first domain, I had built a basic website, registered with Google, and received my first business call. I think I was the most surprised one on the phone since I never thought things would start so quick. This experience happened to coincide with my first IS class, which put into words what I had just experienced. That, thanks to today’s technology, anyone can build a successful company with little more than the web. This empowerment of the individual is one of the main reasons for my interest in the IS field.

Looking to the near future, I hope to be able to share with small businesses and individuals what I have learned about technology in my own experiences. Longer term I hope to continue on with my education and get an MBA, and work for a larger company. And, if it is at all possible, move someplace warm and tropical for a while, I've had enough cold winters for a while.