A visit to the Sun Labs open day(s)

My reason for being in Ca, is to visit the Sun Labs Open House. The day was opened by Bob Sproull, the Labs Director and Greg Papadopolous, Sun’s EVP for R&D and CTO. They both spoke about the goals and accountability of Sun Labs. They look to create new technologies, improve our current technologies or occasionally improve Sun. They are beginning to look at Sun Labs with a venturer’s view and no longer measure the output of white papers, books and conference speeches. Greg Popadopolous said, “these things are better done in Universities”. After the speeches I wandered over to the main building and …

Technology as a service tomorrow

And on to CEC, opened by Hal & Jim. In Hal’s speech, he referred to some research undertaken by Brenda Laurel about how teenagers consume technology, my take away point is that they love their phones, my personal experience is that they don’t use e-mail. He illustrates how kids are consuming technology as a service (albeit transactional service) and that they perceive companies and offering differently. Apple is a design company, not an engineering one. This service orientated computing needs to occur, but the consumers thinks technology is cool, and they’ll be the only buyers years in 20 years time. Again my experience is that having held out for many years, I’ve just bought Sky, internet broad band and a web site (including disk rental). …