Entry No. 116f

IT Writers Awards

write off: Stop thinking you're ever going to get your personal privacy back -- and don't bet your future on the post office. This, as Helen Dancer reports, is the gospel according to Scott McNealy.

Of all the American institutions Sun Microsystems' chief Scott McNealy despises, it seems, the federal postal service falls a slim second to Microsoft, although if the latter is causing him any lack of sleep at night he's not showing it. Visiting the National Press Club in Canberra for the second time in four years, his mood is buoyant, dressed down from his previous jacket and tie. By the time he is invited back, he jokes, he might be down to his normal Sun meeting attire, "blue jeans and a golf shirt". Although he didn't manage to meet John Howard or anyone from the DCITA, he has managed to absorb the prime ministerial mantra of being "relaxed and  comfortable", and launches straight into his favourite sport - bagging Microsoft. 

"You go back about four years ago, Sun Microsystems was going to be NT Roadkill, we were just going to get steamrollered, and now they're convicts and we're doing okay," McNealy exclaims. Musing on the state of the industry and of Sun then and now, the most significant factor in the way both have fared is the internet. "A lot of people say this thing is overhyped and a lot of the dotcom companies are out of control and overpriced and, you know, some of them are, but some of them may be a real bargain," he says. "[But] my thesis is, that the internet is underhyped - big time. I believe we're in the biggest equipment business in the history of anything; the servers that talk to the internet. "When you look at what Lucent and Nortel and Alcatel do, they build dial tone equipment, they build the big frigging switches that do dial tone and call forwarding voice messaging and caller ID and all that stuff.

"And we do web tone switches - big frigging web tone switches.There are only so many features you can get on your telephone but there are an infinite number of features you can get out there on the internet."

And "big frigging webtone switches" is the business to be in, he adds, because "everything with a digital or electrical heartbeat is going to get connected to the internet".

"Think of how many things you own that have a digital or electrical heartbeat ? it's literally into the hundreds," he says. "[A new] automobile alone has 100 microprocessors in it, and it's not even connected to the internet yet."

The technological machinations behind Formula One racing are a case in point, he says. "[For] MacLaren, we download four megabytes of telemetry per lap to a Sun computer, and analyse each and every thing that goes on in that car.

"How much telemetry do we get out of your car? None.

wouldn't it have been useful for Ford to have had online access to every automobile and to know what the tyre pressures were? This is a real live issue that could save lives, not to mention the money that could be saved."

Indeed. Firestone's recall  in the United States of 6.5 million tyres (many on Ford cars) was made because of tread separations and blowouts, which are  now blamed for 101 US highway deaths. McNealy notes smart use of technology has a quantum opportunity to change for the better the way we apply processes.

 "Black boxes, you know what they are? They put them in the tail column of aeroplanes. Why do they put them back there? Well because the G force is a little bit less, assuming they are going nose first. Well, why in the world are we then trying to fish that piece of shrapnel out of the ocean, in a storm - have you ever heard of radio?

"Why not use radio to pump all that telemetry in real time to a Sun server and put that server in a bunker that can withstand a direct hit from a 747? Does that seem obvious? that in the rare chance you actually hit the server, you're still okay?

"It seems so brain-dead obvious to me that we would connect those things." 

 To McNealy, everything you can think of ought to be connected to the internet; people can be connected, via everyday devices such as smart employee ID cards. "This is thin client computing; this smart card is more powerful than the old Apple II computer.

"Every citizen, every employee, every member of the department of whatever, in the government, every student, should have an ID card, with the Java programming language, and then all the cards could be connected to the internet."

 Adding every device, thermostat, cell phone, camera to the internet, multiplies the amount of information out there on the network. And, he adds, it's better to have things connected to the internet, so people don't have to be. For safety, security and sheer convenience, thin client computing is the way to go.

The office of the future will be a bunch of dumb but always-on terminals, and every staff member will pick out an office just as randomly as they pick out a parking spot because their desktop details, access codes and task lists will all be stored on the same ID card they use to gain entry to the building. "Think of the computer sitting on your desk now - who's using it? Think of all the hours that computer sits there and how many you're truly using it? What a waste." 

For now, McNealy notes, the focus of the internet is on just one component, and that's messaging.

"When you think about messaging today, we've got store and forward email, and we still have the US postal service, go figure. AOL shifts more email per day than the US postal service ships first-class mail. So why do we still have all the dog bites and the pollution and the trucks?" McNealy believes the number of union voters may have something to do with that.

"But I digress. That's what the internet is all about today. The internet is 95% messaging. But we aren't even anywhere close to being where we need to be." Everything is being webified, "birth.com, death.com, younameit.com, they'llnevermakemoney.com, they're all out there, getting themselves on the internet".

But McNealy believes the percentage of citizen-owned, structured and unstructured data held within the government available to those citizens via the web in a secure, conditional access, private fashion available on any device, any time, is probably less than 20%, and that's probably true of governments around the world. There's a corresponding huge requirement, he contends, for every government to get with the internet.

And, of course, McNealy's vision centres on Java, the programming language developed by James Gosling and spun off from Sun into its own research development and marketing entity. And the argument, in terms of network overhead, is compelling. It's a waste of time to go putting stuff into those personal productivity applications such as Word and PowerPoint, McNealy believes, and the reason - not purely that by doing so you're pouring profit into Bill Gates' pocket - is network logjam.

He gives the example of a defence department that wants to send a single word message to all the armed forces. "The word 'Attack' in ASCII, which can be viewed from a Java browser, is 48 bits. The word 'Attack' written as a HTML document ? so you can publish it so everyone can go back and check, 'Are we still attacking?' 'Yeah, keep going.' ? is 256 bits, and you can still download that to your cell phone, over the telephone network to your hotel room, wherever you are. Even on your tank, you can probably get it.

"But the word 'Attack' as a Word Document is 90,112 bits, and to make the word 'Attack' as a PowerPoint document and email it out, that's 258,048 bits! I am not making this up!

"Now if by chance this thing does make it through your network and shows up at the other end, and you don't have the right directory, or the right version of PowerPoint, the war is over! 'Oh, we were supposed to attack last week? Oh well, those soldiers from the other side are right here now.' "

As the browser is the cheapest and most network-efficient way to interact with your citizenship, McNealy says governments of the world have an imperative to make citizen-owned, government-held information available on a secure browser. Government services, such as drivers' licences, voting, medical information, entitlements, taxes and so forth, either don't exist on a web site or they exist in fragments on 100 web sites. The challenge for governments, ours included, is to weave the web into a common directory, so that every Australian citizen has his or her own myaustralia.gov.au web site, with all the information pertaining to their life, as well as email access and entertainment preferences, stored in a technology neutral, fully secure, conditional access format that can be accessed on demand.

 "Everyone's nervous about the concept of a national ID card, the government having a directory and a profile on you. This is very American of me, or maybe particularly Scott of me, but I don't particularly care what you read, or what you watch or what you do.

"The real answer is you don't [have any privacy] and you don't want total privacy. You do want somebody to have your medical records. If you get hit by a truck and you can't tell anybody the combination to your safe in your home where your medical records are, then you've got a problem."

McNealy sees a lot of people running from the information age because they see it as a threat. Yet, information can be structured to make it both useful and helpful to the person it involves.

 "Privacy has never been absolute. If you want privacy, don't tell anybody, shop all the time with a mask, use cash and wear gloves. There is always going to be a trade-off. I kind of like people to know what I like because I don't like spam. "But if there's something you truly don't want somebody to know about you, don't tell anybody, don't write it down, just remember it."

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