Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

Mike Arrington, Tim Bray, and Jonathan Schwartz made for an interesting menage at Sun yesterday evening. As usual I wasn’t invited, but Scoble was otherwise occupied and forwarded me the invite. To be fair, Sun doesn’t know what to make of me. When I was in a position to get their attention as back page columnist at InfoWorld, the trade press model was something they could dance with. The analysts made their bones on quotes in the news stories, then resold their clout back through IT and the channel, with a white paper grey market. Even a mashup like the Gillmor Gang they got, but now?

Then the print books collapsed, the online page view wars accelerated the demise of the news sites, and Arrington & Company emerged. But wait, how does Sun fit into the Web 2.0 conversation? That’s a dicey one, what with the great profits and equally calamitous crash of the dot in Web 1.0 bet. So Sun comes up with the Ballmeresque developer developer developer dialogue, this time not with developers but the entrepreneurs who outsource their projects to India and S3. Not a bad idea, but as Tim posted, the lines around Mike were 10 deep.

Dan Farber whispered and then noted rhetorically that while you’d expect the opposite, Arrington was going deep on the tech while Bray was going 50 thousand feet on the ecosystem, VCs and the like. There was really very little sky between their two perspectives, and Jonathan would have been better served to stick around and go head to head with Mike. My instinct is that Jonathan read the room and the opportunity correctly, but then under a little pressure from Farber (who followed up a soft ball about a 60-day try and buy server program with a screamer about what the churn rate was) handled the ball cleanly–the program “is self-funding” meaning he wouldn’t tell us how many were returned but suggested that a few came back with volume orders–and shut a fascinating give and take down and split.

Arrington went deep and wide with his analysis of the world he so clearly dominates–the VC dilemma of how to engage in an S3 angel mashup conversation, his accelerating acknowledgement of the Microsoft collapse, and his gentle parrying of pitches from the assembled CEO wannabes. Bray took the counter-intuitive approach of sitting in front of a sign announcing the Sun Mashup Event and saying he’s been “less impressed with the notion of mashups than a lot of other people.” So many were Google Maps plus X, he chided, but in doing so he came perilously close to tripping over the elephant.

Tim’s leadership in the ODF meme highlights Sun’s problem in intoning the Google bell. Certainly OpenOffice was a tactical thrust in the Microsoft era, but in the Google Age, ODF is just as fundamentally obliterated as Office by my favorite words in GMail: Open as a Google Document. Once again Scott McNealy was ahead of the curve with his Big Freaking Webtone Switch. Yeah, and Google is delivering it. And where is Sun when the world gets divided up between Google and Apple, when Sun has to force its way onto the iPhone much the way they had to with Windows?

But there’s no mistaking the chances that Sun is willing to take, and I don’t mean open sourcing Solaris or Java or even the Sun Ray (which they really should do with Google Apps for Domains and bet the right horse now.) No, those were all great bets that Jonathan signalled two and three years ago and drove through as he consolidated his position. Now the chance they’re taking is to engage with the new media, and not make the mistake that this is a takeover by anybody but a refactoring of power around the user in charge. As Arrington said (I haven’t had time to look at the video so it might have been somebody else or some other night) this is about going direct. Once you get a taste of reading or listening or watching and making up your own mind based on your gut about the source, you don’t go back.

With Arrington, at the end of the day, he usually gets it right. Sometimes he goes a bit too hard at the old way versus the new way for my taste, but everybody needs something to believe in and I trust that he’s sincere there. But whatever it takes to get him there, it’s a journey he seldom fails to take us along on. And Jonathan showed something last night too; he showed up and went a round or so. He looked a little nervous, but like Clapton, he wasn’t afraid to lay out and take a bad review in trade for a good aftertaste. In those moments last night, things got interesting. About redacted time.

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 12:24 am.
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