Prashanth Rai has recently blogged at The CIO Weblog about Sun and grid computing (here), and I thought I would supplement that discussion by pointing to a combo audio and slide presentation given by Jonathan Schwartz (COO of Sun Microsystems), entitled "The Dot.Com Bubble Was Just a Proof of Concept" (find link below).

His thesis is basically that nothing has really changed in past five years except the increase in opportunities. He portrays the bubble as driven by poor business models, accounting fraud, integrity issues, etc. (skip to slides 3 and 4).

Slide 25 portrays a good vision about where the market is going to go. The concept of Infinite Right to Use (RTU) software - a concept that a person or company owns the right to use software anywhere and for whatever purpose - will permit exponential growth in innovative client applications. Clearly a lot of devil in the details, but Jonathan's picture is optimistic, crisp, and reflective.

Personally, I'm not too fond of podcasts and audio presentations because they don't allow you to skip around or speed up the delivery - the presentation here allows you to skip around as you like. Thought it was pretty nice. Thanks to Torsten for bringing it to our attention!

Steve Shu