Perspective: Utility, commodity: IT to follow electricity?

As Silicon Valley emerges from the dot-com bubble, it has become fashionable for high-tech leaders to describe ours as a maturing industry whose slower growth rate is doomed to mirror the increase in gross domestic product.

But that's taking the narrow view. If you look beyond raw silicon and software, you'll see a much bigger industry poised to deliver services based on technology that already exists. What stands between the broad industry and continued growth is not technology, but rather a cultural divide in the deployment and consumption of technology--one slowly being bridged.

This cultural divide is not unique to IT; we've seen this movie before. If you examine the history of many key technologies, you'll find three distinct stages of evolution: customization, standardization and utilization.

Some companies even employed a "chief electricity officer."

In her engaging 2003 book, "Empires of Light," historian Jill Jonnes examines the nascent electric-power industry. At first, she found, electricity was customized and costly. Thomas Edison envisioned building an electric dynamo every few blocks in a major city powering his light bulb. (His first plant served one square mile of New York, and 800 light bulbs, and cost the equivalent of $5 million today.)

Many showplace homes in the mid-1880s, including the Manhattan mansions of John Pierpont Morgan and William Henry Vanderbilt, had their own electric generators (along with a highly trained engineer on the premises to operate them). Some companies even employed a "chief electricity officer" to manage the role of electricity within the business. (Kodak, one of the first companies to build its own power plants, surprisingly still burns about 700,000 tons of costly coal a year to fire two power plants at its Rochester, N.Y., headquarters.)

If that sounds familiar, it's because that's the reality of many data centers in corporate America: They're big, costly, custom-built and run by experts.

It took many years to reach the next stage in the electricity market--standardization--where George Westinghouse's establishment of AC power and long-distance transmission helped set standards we still use today. Those standards (voltages, cycles and the like) enabled electricity to be mass-

Biography
Jonathan Schwartz is president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems.

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Grin 'n Bear it

I like Mr. Schwartz' ideas, though not original they seem visionary if not for the fact they have already been proposed and apparently put to use by competitors. I followed a link (circa 2001) yesterday to a PDF report on the road Sun has taken since the 80's and later when it dominated the server market. Particular attention was paid to their investment in Java as a proprietary commodity to raise revenue. The article, like countless others, mentions Sun's inability to maintain a corporate dialog with the community of developers, corporate peers, and partner/vendors. Bottom line, this is just a rehash of Sun's commitment to amble down a path hoping to strike it rich. Why would anyone want to believe that a company smart enough to create a ubiquitous language, but not smart enough to be the number one revenue generator be able to find its' way now? Too many brains, not enough brawn. As an aside, it's laughable to think that at the time of the writing Sun garnered 23m per annum off licensing of the Java product. That wouldn't pay for the yachts the board owns much less the real estate taxes on the estates. Sun sets.