By Doc Searls
If we had to name a poster product to represent the entire embedded Linux world, it would probably have to be the Cobalt Qube. There was nothing quite like it before, and nothing the same after. Here was an ISP-in-a-box that sold on looks alone. We had to put one on the cover of the __, 199_ issue of Linux Journal. Not long after Cobalt loaned me a Qube 2 to review, a friend of mine — a high-profile software developer and Web personality — went nuts when he saw it in my office. "I have to have it!" he said. "Trust me. I'll show you how to make this thing rock." He did, and he still has it, along with a picture of it on one on his home page with a link to a "We love our Qube" site.
But where Cobalt built its business wasn't in the home server appliance space. It was with ISPs. Here blue Cobalt RaQs and other "server appliances" were the first Web servers to be "productized" like consumer electronics. As Cobalt CEO Stephen DeWitt explained to me a while back, what many ISPs needed was a simple way to buy, bundle and sell increasing volumes and varieties of services that ideally reside in boxes mounted in racks. Cobalt wanted to make it as easy as possible for its ISP customers to sell bundled products to their customers, like any other appliances. And Cobalt made a conscious choice to use the "appliance" label in a business environment where it had never been used before. In the process, Cobalt created the category. The result was racks and racks of blue Cobalt "vending machines" for network services (email, Web hosting, file services, security), database applications, cache, storage, streaming multimedia, ASP services... each bundled into a box and sold as an appliance to ISP customers. The concept attracted third party developers, all writing applications to run on Linux inside Cobalt's boxes. It was a very successful concept, judging just by the $2 billion it cost Sun to buy Cobalt.
This last year Cobalt was acquired by Sun Microsystems, and Stephen DeWitt became Vice President and General Manager of Sun's Server Appliance Business Unit. We caught up with him on his way to an airplane in late January, eager to talk about three subjects where Cobalt has been a standout pioneer: appliances, network infrastructure, and embedded Linux.
Doc Searls: What's your take on the state of embedded Linux right now?
Stephen DeWitt: For those who have followed the evolution of Linux in general, this is a pretty exciting time. You've got one of the most prolific R&D organization in Sun that has had a tremendous influence on the developer community, now embracing a lineup of server appliances that are based on Linux. This is a very powerful time in the evolution of Sun and the evolution of Linux in general. Although in the server appliance world we don't hang our value proposition on the operating system, because it's not how we sell what we build, it is still a very strong statement on the value and applicability of Linux in this category of infrastructure. So it's a good time to talk about what's going on.
Doc Searls: Which is?
Stephen DeWitt: We're shipping a lot of new products. What we launched the other day was not just a coming out party, but the fifth generation of our hosting appliance, which is really the benchmark in that industry. Whether you're Dell or HP or Compaq or Bob's hardware company, you've got to take Cobalt seriously. Now in our fifth generation, it's a pretty solid hosting platform for service providers. And we launched an edge cache. Elvis has left the building. We're rolling now.
Doc Searls: I've been looking back to see if anybody else was calling servers "appliances" before you guys. Would I be wrong to assume you guys created the category?
Stephen DeWitt: You'd be spot on. Who else was there before us? Who went public before we did? The only other appliance company that would roll off anybody's tongue is Network Appliance.
Doc Searls: Another Linux company.
Stephen DeWitt: Right. And they do cool things. There's also a lot of similar heritage there. We're the two that got the category started. They singularly focussed on the storage opportunity in the data center, whereas we're much broader in scope.
Doc Searls: I also never heard of them until I ran into them at Comdex last fall.
Stephen DeWitt: Everybody knows Cobalt was the first in the game. In premise appliances — what we did with the Qube — and certainly what we did in the hosting space... there was certainly nobody before us.
Doc Searls: How would you characterize that space today?
Stephen DeWitt: The market between the router and the server is going to be characterized by appliance companies. We're delivering applications and content to everybody everywhere. If you want to call it the consumer appliances of the Internet, that might be a little hyperbolic; but in terms of building appliance infrastructure for the mass markets, that's what we were birthed to do.
Doc Searls: That's if you're willing to characterize an ISP as a consumer.
Stephen DeWitt: No, but I would put them as, like, the cable provider who's delivering content to the cable system.
Doc Searls: You're selling them what enables them to sell products to end customers.
Stephen DeWitt: You got it. Bingo.
Doc Searls: I also think you rather cleverly conceived the idea of providing them with the inventory they can sell.
Stephen DeWitt: Right. Now if you take the hosting industry as any kind of a benchmark of where we are and where we're going, just look back 24 months. It was like getting cable for a thousand dollars a month. Nobody would buy it and there wasn't much on. Now we're seeing the prices come way way down. AOL Time Warner, AT&T, Qwest, NTT and all the big daddy mother telco cable providers, as expected have all jumped into the mass IP data services market and the prices are dropping like rocks.
Doc Searls: What happens to Covad and Northpoint and guys like that?
Stephen DeWitt: Think of the billions of dollars that AT&T has spent putting fiber in the ground, and they charge you what, five cents a minute? At the end of the day the guys who provide the bandwidth are in a commodity business. And the guys who will make money, in the world of vended applications, or internet content or whatever, will be able to lay services on top of a commodity infrastructure with a business model to support it. You know ultimately that will be the big guys.The new age bandwidth providers like Covad and Northpoint and all of the niche hosting companies are all being consolidated and rolledl up into the big guys who have the business model to market services out to every Tom, Dick and Harry, and offer a core set of data services and layer value on top of that. On top of that four cent per minute long distance you can get call waiting, caller ID, call forwarding, *69 and all that stuff. That may not be a perfect example of what's going to happen with the Net, but it's not far off.
Doc Searls: Not once it starts co-locating.
Stephen DeWitt: Yup.
Doc Searls: We just started Embedded Linux Journal, which might not exist in quite the same form if Cobalt hadn't existed, since you were the first to occupy the embedded Linux space with a high-profile product that productized the concept of an appliance.
Stephen DeWitt: You may be very right.
Doc Searls: So I was at the Applilance Paviliion at Comdex last fall, looking around at all these things called applliances, which included handhelds and clients as well as servers.There was stuff from Network Appliance, IBM, Nokia, Motorola... I asked what operating systems each one ran, and most of them were using Linux. But they're not talking about it — not all of them, anyway. It's turned into commodity infrastructure.
Stephen DeWitt: Right.
Doc Searls: So the question for me is: what's the Linux development conversation about in the embedded market space we call appliances? Is it about the tool chain and specialized embedded Linux companies like Lineo, MontaVista and so forth — the Wind Rivers of this new space? Or is it about something else? Especially when there isn't a fight going on that's attracting attention from other categories? The victory of Linux in this space is a huge story as far as we're concerned. We wouldn't be in business if it weren't so. But in the absence of conflict not a lot of news is leaking out. What do you think is really going on here? Why should somebody rolll their own Linux, versus using Lineo's, or Red Hat's?
Stephen DeWitt: It's funny, because we started out with Red Hat with a little customization. Now we're four years and five generations down the road. We still start with the basic Red Hat distribution because when you court developers — whether for embedded or mainstream applications — you need a common reference point. That's what using Red Hat gives us. But it's in the middleware that we've invested our value add. We're 100-plus engineers for a number of years worth of work, building a platform on top of the operating system. You are absolutely right that the embedded market was won overnight by Linux and nobody knew it. That is because what we've all gotten savvy to is that nobody wants to play at the operating system level. And nobody knows if there is a business model there. Is there a sustainable business model there for Be? I have no interest in that business. But I know that developers need a reference so you go best in class, which is Red Hat, at least in terms of market appeal, and you build your value above that. What we have done is put all of our management technology, all of our clustering technology, things like active server page integration on non-NT platforms, linkage in for third party developers to build their application and link into our UI, or link into our other tool sets quickly... all the classic middleware functions. That's where we put a lot of our energy, so anybody who is building any kind of application on Linux can very quicly leverage our appliance value proposition and deliver an appliance to market. And that's very compelling for certain classes of applications. So we've got close to 3500 developer partners. With just a four year old company. Everybody from Bob's software to Main Street database, streaming, cacheing, e-commerce, storage, and a whole slew of verticals — medical, legal... all being delivered as appliances.
Doc Searls: Boxes.
Stephen DeWitt: Yeah. I've got to deliver a guy this box that he uses as an application. He pushies an ON button starts using what he paid for. He doesn't dicker with CD-ROMs or operating systems. One of the problems in the traditional embedded space was that you had kind of proprietary ways of doing things. That gave companies like Wind River a lot of control. In the Linux world, you have a referenceable, all-world operating system that everybody is exposed to. You're not married to any particular distribution. You can go off on any tangent and add the value you need for any particular application. It makes a helluva lot of sense to me.
Doc Searls: It's two-by-fours.
Stephen DeWitt: Exactly! A good way of looking at it. You're not going to Joe's lumber company and he suckers you into something that works just the way he wants to do it.
Doc Searls: Would you say your 3500 devlelopers are developing for Linux?
Stephen DeWitt: Totally.
Doc Searls: So, sitting on top of the Net, Linux is additional commodity infrastructure.
Stephen DeWitt: Yup. Good way of looking at it.
Doc Searls: So it's a general purpose operating system that lends itself to all kinds of single purposes. Then you turn those into various appliances.
Stephen DeWitt: Bingo.
Doc Searls: Let's look at what you called the "premise" space earlier, where you introduced the Qube several years ago. What's happening there now? What's the future of the Qube?
Stephen DeWitt: I think it's actually doing ... it's just blowing me away. It's a product that, from the day it was first featured on the cover of Linux Journal, all the way through it's heritage — we just had another release a few months ago — has just been doing great. It's an ideal premise appliance for any big service provider looking to reach down to the other end of the wire. You're going to see us do so much more here. We've announced two major deals so far. One with NTT/Docomo to create a wireless premise appliance, and one with France Telecom to create a dedicated educational appliance for the French market. These are big service providers who reach millions and millions of subscribers, and want to create some sort of device where they're delivering some sort of network value-add at the customer's premise. We are in the works on a bunch of other things, but watch very closely at what we're doing this next quarter, where either big cable providers or telcos are going to hang this sort of class of consumer appliances at the end of a leased line or the end of a DSL line or some other kind of line, so that they can serve up some content or applications at the customer premisee. Those could be very far-reaching. It can be everything from home networking applications to home Web applications, to entertainment applications. It's kind of like having a juke box at the end of the wire.
Doc Searls: How about instant messaging, like what Jabber is up to?
Stephen DeWitt: The folks at iPlanet have been all over us like a cheap suit to do some kind of IM appliance. All of this stuff is coming, and it's coming in a hurry.
Doc Searls: There was some concern that Sun would force you guys to use Solaris instead of Linux in your appliances. Is that moot at this point?
Stephen DeWitt: Yeah. Definitely. If you look in the records, Ed and Scott have been outspoken about this. Cobalt is doing what Cobalt is doing, which is building appliances. Again, this isn't about OSes. Linux isn't the issue. Sun loves Linux. Sun has never had anything but positive things to say about Linux. It's the chip set that's the goofy thing. Right now we're running on Intel architecture. Now that's a little bit of an issue, and rightfully so. We'll probably be AMD-centric, long-term. As for Linux, I haven't had anybody give me any pressure on Linux at all. It's UNIX. Everything Sun's doing supports that. At the end of the day you'll put the right engine and the right set of wheels on whatever kind of car you're building. For what we're building, Linux makes a lot of sense. If we decide to do a high end storage appliance that requires a twelve-way box, well my bet is that it will be a Solaris-based appliance. But for what we're doing in this space, Linux is a no-brainer.
Doc Searls: So Sun's advocacy of Solaris is not inconsistent with its use of Linux in Cobalt server appliances.
Stephen DeWitt: Not at all.
Doc Searls: In the same way as you introduced the appliance concept to what we might call co-location of services, are you going to branch out from there? Or are you going to concentrate on continuing to define what happens where you're active today?
Stephen DeWitt: First, we have a lot of products on the drawing board right now. Certainly we're going to extend down in to the home networking and gateway market, and at the same time we're going to expand into the enterprise with different classes of solutions. There is a whole emerging market of IP service providers. If I'm General Electric or a fill-in-the-blank Fortune 500 company, I'm looking to leverage the Net to deploy my applications and content as well. There is a whole class of developers there who can leverage the whole appliance play in the delivery of their applications. So you're definitely going to see us in the enterprise where our class of infrastructure has never been before. And you're going to see us down at the other end of the wire, which not only is a new business for Cobalt, but a completely new business for Sun. I mean, Sun has dominated the big enterprise, service provider and telco markets, and appliances is a new opportunity for them, both down-market and up-market. Also new products. We're going to deliver a whole new family. Not just premise and hosting applilances. Look for us to branch?
Doc Searls: What about Jini?
Stephen DeWitt: Maybe. Jini on a whiteboard Jini is a very valuable technology. It's Java created after the Web. We've always leveraged Java-type technologies, and always will because it courts the developer community. Jini is a slightly different animal. We haven't figured out a roadmap at this point. So essentially, yes. It's just too early to say where we'll go with it.
Doc Searls: So your job is to broaden the definitiion of what appliances are and where they go.
Stephen DeWitt: Absolutely.
Doc Searls: How would you define an appliance?
Stephen DeWitt: Fundamentally, its a dedicated piece of infrastructure that is optimized to deliver a single application or a set of applications. It's not a general purpose platform designed to run anything. It's optimized to deliver a networked application.
Doc Searls: So single purpose rather than general purpose.
Stephen DeWitt: Wellll... single purpose isn't right. We have multi-purpose appliances, but they are not general purpose computers. We have hosting appliances delivering mail and Web and network services. It's not single purpose but rather optimized for a hosted customer. It's tailored for delivering networked applications, first and foremost. It's not client-server. It's about network applications. And there is no exposure to an operating system. There are no CD-ROMs, no monitors, no keyboards. The total cost-of-ownership model around an appliance is measured in dollars, not thousands of dollars. Those are critical components of the story as well. You never need to go down to a command line. We're talking about consumer class ease of use and reliability. Meaning you're more likely to reach mean time between failure with the drive than the application.
Doc Searls: That is an interesting characterization.
Stephen DeWitt: Think about it, when was the last time your microwave died? We want five-nines reliability (99.999%). Traditionally you can't get there without speding hundreds of thousands of dollars. But when you build a stereo, you expect those five nines. When we first sat down to build these appliances we sat down and asked, "How can we build a sub-$1,000 box that anybody can use with any level of expertise, that will never fail, for any particular application? And, multiple generations later, we'ver pretty much perfected that model.
Doc Searls: Reliability.
Stephen DeWitt: Also consumer-class ease of use, reliability and pricing for networked applications.
Doc Searls: What about Web client appliances.
Stephen DeWitt: Not interested.
Doc Searls: I have a theory about those. When you're sitting at your desk looking at the Web, you want a general purpose device. You want a client operating system.
Stephen DeWitt: Right. That's personal computing. The PC may be dead, but personal computing is alive and kicking. We all do it differently, and we need a box that lets us be who we are.
Doc Searls: Did you follow Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld, where he said the latest revolution for the PC is to serve as the hub of one's digital lifestyle. It's where your MP3s get stored. It's a general purpose device around which all these single-purpose things — camcorder, MP3 player, DVD player, PDA — revolve.
Stephen DeWitt: Good.
Doc Searls: It seemed to be focussed on the consumer electronics industry. He clearly cut a deal allowing Apple to be the first company to support the recording of DVDs, scrupulously associating that with home movies rather than recording and playing back movies on TV. So I'm wondering if there's more to say about the relationship between the general purpose client on your desk — call it a personal hub — and the set of network services you're getting from an appliance at an ISP.
Stephen DeWitt: You know, it's just a recepticle. A socket.
Doc Searls: So what you care about is boxing up services and selling them to providers in ways that make it easy for them to sell to their customers, who have those sockets out there.
Stephen DeWitt: Yeah, at the end of the day, when you think about the evolution of the cable industry, and that little box sitting on your TV, you don't care about what operating system it runs. You pay your two bucks, and your content is there. Somewhere back inside your serice provider is all the infrastructure that makes all of that happen. We're the company that makes the box and the infrastructure back at the service provider that makes it all happen. And it always works, it's always cheap, and incredibly easy to use.
Doc Searls: It's interesting to me that those five nines are now the most basic value statement.
Stephen DeWitt: If you're going to sell to the Fortune One Billion, you can't sell what fails. The Fortune One Billion can't deal with failure. We wouldn't have 98% of homes with televisoin if TVs were hard to use. Or if every now and then we had to reboot one.
Doc Searls: Will you ever really get to those five nines with general purpose personal devices, with PCs? Aren't they just a little too open-ended in purpose?
Stephen DeWitt: Yes, to some degree. As soon as you open the door you introduce things that can hurt reliability. If you create a solid state, there's overhead involved with that as well. The fundamental thing that changed everything, and what made Linux so hot in the first place, is putting developers into a billion-person marketplace. Before, with PCs, it was one person. As soon as you make the billion-person context your backdrop, you change the requirements for the way you architect and deliver applications. It's changed forever. That's why the role of an operating system, which a few years ago dictated evolution in this industry, is infrastructural. The old way went with the dodo as soon as the Internet showed up.
Doc Searls: I think computing got social when it started to happen on the Internet. It was no less personal, but it had a social context. And a lot of functionality will sit out there in the social context.
Stephen DeWitt: You got it.
Doc Searls: So you've located a lot of your reliability on the server. The strategy is to locate as much reliability on the server as a way of dealing with the inherent unreliability that shows up around the client.
Stephen DeWitt: Absolutely. You have to take out the complexity. Put it back in the server. That's one thing. The other is, create a class of infrastructure that really does the job. If you have to cut down a tree, would you rather do it with a pocket knife or a chain saw?
Doc Searls: Once the concept catches on, and people understand it, the applications follow.
Stephen DeWitt: The microwave is a good example. It may have the general purpose of cooking food, but it's extremely simple and good for certain kind of things, like cooking bags of popcorn. So now you see all kinds of people creating food for cooking in microwaves, just like people are creating applications that can be serviced in an appliance.
Doc Searls: Let's go back to Linux again. It's two-by-fours. Commodity building material for building infrastructure. I have a theory that what's going to happen with manufacture will be similar to what happened with publishing a few years ago with the PC, or with putting up a business that uses the Web. The threshold of enterprise is getting lower and lower as the cheap and easy infrastructure starts to appear. I'm wondering about big manufacturing businesses that specialize in small things — such as consumer electronics. It seems to me that it's getting easier and easier for anybody who's motivated to get into the appliance business, and to diversify that category. If you want to put a TCP/IP stack and some intelligence on my stereo, I can do that. I can make the whole stereo, or a component, whatever. There are Linux geeks out there making MP3 players for cars. Already.
Stephen DeWitt: Absolutely. It's a new game. Take a look at our lab some day. Everything you can imagine is being thought of back there, and we're working on it. Lighting systems. All kinds of stuff. Wireless you-name-it. I don't want to call this the Radio Shack crowd of the next millennium, but the fact that you can now whip together all sorts of stuff is really significant. Some of it is going to stick. The good thing is that the rate of change is getting even more rapid —
Doc Searls: — And the cost of failure is getting lower.
Stephen DeWitt: Exactly.
Doc Searls: So you can experiment a lot more.
Stephen DeWitt: You bet.
Doc Searls: And we'll be seeing a lot more stuff nobody expects.
Stephen DeWitt: And a lot of it is going to be crap. And some of it will stick.
Doc Searls: And even manufacturing, which used to be something only big suppliers did, will get more diversified, small scale, adaptable.
Stephen DeWitt: Yup. You got it.
Doc Searls: There will be guys who make plastics for less money. Others who make boards for less money. Others who integrate software on chips for less money.
Stephen DeWitt: You got it. The economics of internetworking. It's because we've gone up to a size of potential market that's so much bigger that the costs are also coming down accordingly. Economics 101 being re-taught in the age of the Internet.
Doc Searls: This is what I was hoping to get, and we thank you very much.
Stephen DeWitt: You bet. Any time.