San Francisco

Sun Microsystems Chief Executive and Chairman Scott McNealy is the reigning king of the one-liner in the US business community.

Most often, media attention focuses on his killer put-downs of Microsoft products and its founder and Chairman Bill Gates. Such as calling Gates and Microsoft President, Steve Ballmer "Ballmer and Butthead" in reference to buffoonish cartoon characters Bevis and Butthead.

But McNealy also captures the frustration of many business consumers of information technology in his pithy one-liners.

During a recent trip to Australia, he captured the sentiment of many computer users tired of spending endless hours trying to get their technology to do what it promises, and having to learn to explore the intricacies of operating systems in the process. "You shouldn't have to learn how to operate the Hoover Dam to take a shower," McNealy declared.

Demystifying the Internet for the broader business and consumer community is the basis of Sun's competitive strategy. If business computing evolves in the way McNealy expects, it will transform the nature of the Information Revolution yet again, by making technology truly invisible and empowering chief executives at all levels of business.

McNealy and the Sun executive team have for years spoken about their vision of the webtone – the idea that logging on to the Internet will be as reliable and instantaneous as picking up a telephone receiver as getting dial tone (see related article: An audience with Greg Papadopoulos).

But McNealy told his audience at the National Press Club in Canberra that he saw the telephony model applying more broadly to the Internet than just the user experience. He believes businesses will buy Internet access, and Internet-based software and services, in the same way as they buy telephony.

To McNealy, the telephony example powerfully illustrates why the way the information industries transact with business today can not be sustained.

"Think about how people buy telephone equipment," he said.

"When Telstra wants to go fill this room with equipment they do not go out and buy; the chip from Intel, the operating system from Microsoft, the sheet metal and plastic and power supply from Compaq, the database from Oracle, the application from SAP, the middleware from CA, the network management from Tivoli, the application server from BEA, the uninstaller and anti-virus from Norton, and the disc drive from EMC and the sound blaster from off the Internet, and then put it all together and bring EDS or IBM Global Services in to make it work. You'd never make a phone call! It would never go through!

"You'd be lucky if you ever picked up and got a dial tone.

"What do they do? They tell Lucent, Nortel, Alcatel, Seimens, whoever, 'Bid on this. Here are the specs of what I need and whoever wins gets the whole room. And you come in, you install it, get it up and running, and tell me when you're ready to turn it over for production.

"And if anything ever goes wrong, I've got one throat to choke.'

"That how it works in that business and that's how the Internet computing model is going to work in the future."

This is a model that has little room for today's household names of the personal computer era as consumer brands.

"If you believe in that model, who is the moral equivalent of Intel in the telephone switch business? What's the name of the Lucent OS (operating system)? Who knows? Who cares?

"There's a million lines of code in (a mobile phone). You didn't buy any of it. You bought a system."

McNealy's hopes for Sun to dominate the business of providing the webtone might be wildly ambitious, but his company does not have to dominate for the vision to come true. Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq and a raft of other big vendors will be only too ready to seize the opportunity if they see it as the way of the future.

Although Internet access has moved way beyond a novelty in the business world, it has a long way to go before it becomes as basic a tool of operation as the telephone. But if Internet services were bought and installed in the same way as telephony services, it is likely that businesses would incorporate them into their operations as seamlessly as the telephone has been.

Already, the attitude of many corporate leaders has changed the way information technology is applied in the corporate world, with companies such as Ford putting the Internet at the very core of their business models (see related articles: Ford Drives Motor Industry Innovation)

Just as few would consider it possible to be in business today without a telephone, ease of use should make the Internet ubiquitous and seamlessly integrated throughout the business world. It will soon be expected that every business will be able to offer internet-based services, like instant tracking of orders to all consumers. Laggards who cannot offer consumers, suppliers and clients the basic range of Internet facilities are likely to struggle to find a place in the commercial world.