So let's say you were a Taiwanese company trying to develop a Taiwanese language development tool, you could pick up this code and ... build your own product. We like this because you are doing is investing in this pool of open source components but you are also making your own market and making your own money.
Now if you want to design a Taiwanese Office Suite with full file compatibility with Microsoft Office, you could pick up all of these components and you could produce your own product over here. This is all already compatible with Microsoft.
You could compete directly with Microsoft tomorrow, you don't have to spend 10 years developing the code ... because it's all open source.
So yes, I think Sun has a great deal to offer a country like Taiwan who is producing its own local software.
TT: The Taipei Times is all for open standards, but Sun is a corporation ... what's in it for the firm?
Phipps: Sun's business model differs from the business model of many other companies in the Internet and software industry.
If you take a typical company like Microsoft for example, they seek to grow the business by capturing the market. We seek to grow the business by growing the market. Those sound similar but they are very different from each other. Our approach is vision-driven and open standards-based.
What we want to do is we want to see open standards being defined so that our partner community is able to profit from those standards.
We have a very Keiretsu type approach to our idea of a partner, so a company like IBM is a partner, a company like Oracle is a partner, there would be nothing to stop a company like Microsoft from being a partner. But of course their problem is they're not big team players when it comes to these things.
So, our approach is different, and the result of that is we expect to profit through the growth in the Web services market.
We will sell more hardware, we will sell more storage, we will also sell more Solaris licenses, we will sell iPlanet services, we will sell forte for Java Internet edition licenses for software developers. In the process of doing those things, I don't anticipate any of those becoming monopolistic.
There will be other players in that market. It's an interesting relationship we have with iPlanet because we also want (competitor) VA to succeed because they're our partner ... we have many partners and our philosophy has always been we cooperate on standards and compete on implementation.
Now what you're seeing is us having more growth on implementation. We intend to be a strong competitor. IPlanet products will be the best server products available but that doesn't mean we're going to want to stop being partners with Oracle or VA or anyone.
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