I think most of us have imagined a scenario where we didn’t have to work for money for a long period of time. “Yay!” you think. “Long vacation!” You may imagine drinking fruity concoctions on a beach — that’s what I imagined. Mmm, paradise.

Since I sold Simpli in September, I haven’t had to work for income…nor will I have to work for income for a minimum of 5 more years (if I spend aggressively and buy a house with mostly cash) or 8-10 more years if I am more conservative. That’s right…I do nothing, or whatever I want, and I get a check in the mail every month. Wow, sounds like the height of pure awesomeness, right?

It’s funny that life gives you as many challenges as you can handle. There’s just no “easy” life out there. We were put here, I believe, to learn and grow, and for my part, if I don’t feel like I’m learning and/or growing, I am not a happy person. Most of my learning and growing came from work-related activities over the past 6 years. Now it has to come from somewhere else. It has to come from ME. I have to be motivated to learn and grow and decide what that means for me. My future is wide open, and if I’m not strong, I could easily succumb to lack of motivation and become an addict.

I can see easily why most people who win the lottery can’t make it work and end up broke. It has something to do with this fantasy that you’ll never have to work again — that suddenly life will be perfect, if only… [insert change you want here.] Of course, if that change does happen, you find out that that’s not the case at all. (more…)

An interesting synchronicity occurred today.

Let me preface this by saying that I read a lot of blogs. I spend hours a week reading blogs, and I consider most of them part of my work time. Blogs help me know what the trends are. Blogs help me know what our customers want (I read several of our customers’ blogs.) And most importantly, the really good blogs out there fairly often provide insights that I just wouldn’t have had otherwise.

This is pretty much what happened a few days ago when I read Tantek’s blog about human interface design. Basically, he stated that one of the reasons Twitter is so popular is that it only has one text field where you can enter anything you want and it’ll get broadcast to your friends. I am also powerfully drawn to the simplicity of Twitter (btw, I’m ericabiz on Twitter and you can click there to add me and follow me around.) The reason why people who are into Twitter are Twittering tens or hundreds of times more often than they blog is because blogging, for most, is a large effort: Log into your blog software, then click the create post link, then type a subject, pick categories (I hate categories) and then blog, proofread, blog, proofread, blog, proofread, and finally post. Then you have to watch for spam on your blog and make sure your friends’ comments aren’t getting marked as spam. Frankly, this is a large effort to go through even though companies like WordPress try to make it a lot easier. That means that most of the people who blog on a regular basis actually enjoy writing and find it rewarding enough to jump through the hurdles…like me. There are, however, hundreds of things I just don’t have time to blog about, or I can’t make long enough to fit into a blog post…so I Twitter them instead. This is a powerful recognition.

Jeff Lindsay, one of our customers and also a friend of mine, has also been blogging some really good stuff lately. In particular, I’m thinking of his recent post regarding open source web services. Jeff thinks virtualization is the future of web hosting, and mentions so in that post. I happen to agree, but in a long term, meta way, not in an immediately practical “I can host my web server on a cluster and it’ll be faster and cheaper than hosting it on a dedicated server today” way. (We’ve run the benchmarks, and with today’s technology virtualization is both more expensive and slower than dedicated servers. That’s not to say that won’t change in the future, however.)

Jeff also brings up utility computing, which is the trend that’s worried me most about hosting. Amazon has introduced their EC2 computing service, which allows you to buy all the gigabytes and megabits you want on an as-needed basis. That means Amazon and other large companies are gearing up to turn web hosting into a utility that you turn on and pay for as you use, much like electricity or water. This is good in some respects because the centralization of these services is lowering the barrier to create and distribute web services. But these services are also evangelizing that web hosting is about bits, bytes, and cost per unit. I feel strongly that the removal of people from any industry leads it down a path that we as a society don’t want to go down — that the more we dehumanize services, the more that we forget that we are, indeed, creating and distributing these services for other human beings. The more we make any industry all about costs, prices, and numbers, the more we lose focus on moving society to a better place together as a whole and helping other people, and that’s why I fight the trend toward making web hosting into a numbers game.

That’s getting pretty tangential, so I’ll get back to my point. The third fortuitous thing that happened was that I again picked up and began reading The Science of Getting Rich today. This book is highly recommended if you are interested in being rich by delivering value to others instead of by taking away or competing with others. It showcases a step-by-step method to having everything you ever could wish for in your life without feeling “guilty” that you have money and others don’t…and it shows you how to make others rich as well, so they don’t have to feel guilty or bad either.

Relevant quote from the book: “The normal desire for increased wealth is not an evil or reprehensible thing; it is simply the desire for more abundant life — it is aspiration.” Powerful stuff, and if you resonate with that sentence, I urge you to go buy the book and read the rest of it.

I had three things in my mind at that point: Tantek’s blog, and with it a realization that I needed to change Simpli’s website to make it much easier for those who need web hosting to order from us; Jeff’s blog, and a general agreement with his assessment of the future, but also a dissatisfaction of the hosting industry being turned into a numbers game of “who can deliver me the most gigabytes and megabits for my money?”; and The Science of Getting Rich, which (among many other things) states: “In so far as your business consists of dealing with other people, the key-thought of all your efforts must be to convey to their minds the impression of increase.”

That sentence hit me like a lightning bolt and shifted my perspective dramatically. It hit me so hard that I had to put down the book and start sketching out a new website for Simpli. What does everybody want? To be more successful! Why do they want to change hosting providers, or to start a new business which will need a hosting provider? To be more successful; to make more money; to serve their customers better! Then why is every hosting provider talking about gigabytes and megabits?! Why does our website say “100% uptime” on the front page? That’s a great thing, but it doesn’t convey to our customers what they really need!

So, do you know what our new website is going to say? Right on the front page, it’s going to say “We help your business grow and succeed.” And we’re no longer going to have categories like “Dedicated servers” and “Colocation” (although we’ll have links to those so people who are looking for something specific can find it quickly.) No, instead we’re going to organize it by business category: “Startup”, “Growth Mode”, and “Advanced.” And we’re going to offer an hour of consulting, either in person or on the phone/Skype, before you buy a hosting package from us, to make sure you’re getting the right hosting package that can scale with you as your website skyrockets to popularity.

Why? Because that’s what you want. You want to run a more successful business. You want to leverage the Web and email to make you more money and to make your customers happy by delivering them more value. And we want to help you do that. No more gigabytes and megabits on our front page. No more competing on price. We’re here to deliver you more value than any other hosting company out there, and we’re here to turn the slow slide of the web hosting industry into a numbers game on its head.

The new website will be up by April 1, 2007. I’m ready to make Simpli living, breathing proof that the world, and particularly the computer industry, is built on human interaction — on serving people — and not on numbers. In other words, I’m changing the world. Again.

Tara (always an interesting read and a very cool chick who gets it) writes about finding her mojo in a recent blog entry. She goes into detail about companies that have “mojo” (that almost unexplainable “cool” vibe you get when you use their products or services) vs. ones that don’t. A couple of the points she mentions are “don’t be a commodity” — since commodities compete on price, not value — and “have a higher purpose” — which is a point I jibe with on a personal level, but never quite really had on a business level.

Until now.

Let’s go back a couple of years, first. Probably one of the most important lessons I ever learned in business was back when I was busting my butt and going to every networking event to not only find customers, but to figure out what customers really wanted in a hosting company. That lesson came in a surprisingly simple form: “Why do your customers choose Simpli?” a business owner asked me at one of those networking events.

I totally tripped over the question. It caught me off guard. “Well…we have great uptime, and are at a fantastic data center…” I stammered. I mean, we had happy customers, and they referred their friends. We were growing at a tremendous rate and could barely rack and stack servers fast enough. We had a great network…in fact, that’s what Simpli touted on its front page: 100% Network Uptime Guarantee. Surely that was why customers chose us!

“That’s not why customers choose you,” he said, smiling. At that moment I had nothing but absolute hatred for this man. How dare he tell me why my customers chose me! How arrogant of him! He wasn’t even a customer of ours! How could he possibly know something that I, the owner of the company in question, did not know?

He could tell I was offended, and apologized. “I didn’t mean to come off like that,” he said. “But what you need to do is ask your customers why they chose you. I think you will find the answer surprising.”

I left, still angry, but conceding that the guy had a point. Knowing I had some homework to do, I emailed some of our best customers and asked them why they really chose us…and the answers floored me. Here I had thought that the #1 secret to running a successful hosting company was to keep the network up and running and the servers happy…and my customers are telling me that while that was important, it wasn’t the reason they chose Simpli. In fact, they realized that a bit of downtime was “in the cards,” as they say. Server hardware does fail. Routing hiccups happen. And while we do our best to maintain 100% uptime, including buying those fancy redundant routers and switches and utilizing multiple network providers, things will still fail every once in a while.

What my customers were saying was that they appreciated Simpli for 1) really doing our best to keep everything online and running, and 2) when bad things did happen, they appreciated the way we communicated issues and kept them in the loop the entire time. In fact, during the 99.99% of the time when things did go well, they enjoyed our personal support, our reaching out of an extra hand, and the willingness of our staff to go the extra mile to make sure our customers were satisfied at every point in the process.

Our customers had mentioned this difference when I had those conversations back in early 2005, but I hadn’t really seen how we were different from our competitors until today.

Yesterday, we signed a new customer and agreed to pick up their servers from a colocation company in San Francisco, which I am not naming here in this blog because their name is not the point. They are a competitor of ours for sure — we have picked up several customers from them in the past, and lost a few. It’s been a net gain for us, however, and the customers we’ve gained had some real war stories about them. Since potential customers often quoted this company against Simpli, I wanted to understand for myself what their setup looked like and how their staff worked. I offered a significant discount to our new customer to go pick up their servers from the other colocation company, and offered to do it myself (even though I haven’t de-racked servers for Simpli in almost a year) because I wanted to see the entire process.

I went into the datacenter and signed in at the security desk, only to be told I wasn’t on the access list for that company. The security guard called their sales manager, who explained that “for security reasons, the security guard does not have Internet access” and that they printed an access list for the guard every day. Okay, fine, I get that, but the problem was that our customer had added me to the access list yesterday at 10AM PST…plenty of time to get me on the printout today. When I explained that to the sales manager, he patronized me, using a “there, there” sort of tone: “You don’t have to be so impatient. Just give me 20 seconds and we’ll get this sorted out. Now if you could please hand the phone back to the security guard so he can put you on the list, we’ll get this all sorted out for you right away.”

That was sorted, then (still with no explanation of how the access list mysteriously got printed this morning without my name on it) and I was off to the datacenter. I asked where I was supposed to go and the security guard said “2nd floor” and pointed in a vague “that” direction. “Elevators?” I asked and he nodded. Okay, no problem. I went into the elevator and headed up to the second floor. A couple other people got out there, too. I had absolutely no idea where I was supposed to go, so I asked one of them. He pointed at a door and said “There.”

The access badge I had been given opened the door, and I was faced with a datacenter. Of course, I had no idea where our customers’ servers were, and everyone else had disappeared. I looked around and spotted someone who looked like he worked there. I asked him where our servers were. “What’s your customer ID?” he responded. (Note: I hate that question. No one wants to be treated like a number.) I told him I had no idea. He pointed at the badge I was now wearing and said “It’s on your badge.”

“Oh,” I said. I was feeling really stupid at this point. I sucked it up and moved on. “Can you help me find our servers?”

“Use the phone,” he said, pointing at a red phone on the wall. “That calls our NOC” — he pointed at a wall with a couple windows in it. Behind it, I could see cubicles. Wait, you have to use a phone to call the guys you can see through the window? Uh, okay… I turned around to ask if he could help, but he had disappeared. I picked up the phone and watched one of the guys on the other side of the window answer it. He came out and showed me the servers. Finally!

This will turn into a long story if I unravel the entire 1 hour, 47 minutes I spent there deracking just 5 servers. (Typically I can de-rack 5 servers in about 45 minutes.) Here are some of the experiences I had:

• I picked up the phone and asked for a screwdriver. They found one and helpfully told me where the rest of the tools were. Yay! Except there weren’t any other tools there, and the screwdriver they had given me was too small for some of our screws. Picked up the phone again. Waited. The guy took several more minutes to dig up a bigger screwdriver, and chastised me with “Haven’t you been here before? You’re supposed to bring your own tools.” Great, except I didn’t have any and wasn’t warned about that. Again, I felt like an idiot.
• I needed a knife or scissors to cut some zip ties. Another phone call and more waiting and the same guy came out with his personal knife (apparently they don’t stock scissors there?) and cut the zip ties for me. Then I found out I had more zip ties to cut, but he had already disappeared. Picked up phone again, waited…same guy came out with the knife. I began to feel sorry for their techs.
• The servers’ rails were really stuck, so I asked for help. The first time I asked for help de-racking them, the tech said “No”, turned around, and walked off. I picked up the phone and waited again. He came out again. This time, another tech came out to help him. This second tech told me that the other guy was new on the job and didn’t know “the rules.” “The rules” apparently included the following, all of which were direct quotes from this guy’s mouth: 1) “We are not allowed to help colo customers.” 2) “We should be charging you for this.” 3) “We’re not datacenter techs; we’re sysadmins.” 4) “Only facilities is allowed to help you de-rack servers.” 5) “You’ll have to enter a ticket and wait for your credit card on file to be charged, and then we can assign someone to this.” 6) “Just be polite.” (I wasn’t aware I wasn’t being polite by asking you nicely to help me de-rack some stuck servers.) And the kicker, which I hereby nominate for Worst Tech Line Ever: 7) “Yeah, um, we do this for a living, okay?” Like I don’t!

All in all, I’d have to say that was the worst colocation-related experience I’ve had in my life, and I’ve de-racked many servers many times. We finally did get the servers de-racked (it took all 3 of us working in tandem — those were some nasty rails) and I walked off, shaking my head.

I recognize this for what it was…probably the best example ever of what sets Simpli apart from most hosting companies. Put simply, we actually give a damn about our customers. We’re the colo company that invites you into our office, lets you sit on the couch, and serves you some water. And we actually (gasp!) have scissors and screwdrivers and zip ties and let you use them. Our techs don’t have condescending, arrogant, holier-than-thou, “we do this for a living” attitudes — we hire people who are smart, with good tech skills, and actually love to help others. In fact, if any of our techs ever had an attitude like that other colo company’s tech did, I’d fire them without even thinking twice. But I know they don’t because I’ve seen them in action, and our customers will back me up on that.

I got that before, but I didn’t really get it from a customer perspective. Now I do. It’s inspired me to finally get our old, long-in-the-tooth, all-about-the-uptime website kicked to the curb. Now I know what I need to write about Simpli. It’s clear that our attitude shines through, and that’s why we win customers. It’s all about helping people and making them realize that they and their businesses are valued. And while we still have our faults and places we could improve, I know in my heart we’re doing the right thing, and that is what will make us successful in the long term.

It was a long and interesting path to finding Simpli’s mojo, but I found it, and I’m ready to tell the world.

By the way, here’s what our new customer had to say: “What kind of customer service is this?”

I’ve been struggling a lot lately. I’ve been angry about a lot of things. Over in the work field, mostly, which is what I’ll blog about here…but it applies in a similar way to my personal life as well.

As I look around the office here, I realize I am not where I want to be in life. Somewhere inside of me, I know Simpli can be an amazingly successful company. That’s what attracts customers and employees to us. It’s what people see in me that makes the difference between selecting Simpli as their hosting provider and selecting another (faceless) hosting provider. You also know that I’ve done something amazing and will continue to do amazing things. That’s why you read my blog.

I have a confession to make: Simpli barely breaks even every month. I know we have lots of reasons why that’s the case, but they all boil down to something simple. You see, I’ve been running this business the wrong way. The reason the business isn’t massively profitable is because I actually fear running a successful business.

“What?” you might be saying right now. “But you already run a successful business!” Yeah, I do. And I’ve struggled with that for a long time. You see, I never intended Simpli to be a $1M/year business. I intended it to be something fun that made me some extra money on the side while I did web design and programming and whatever else floated my boat. Except that word got out that Simpli was doing something different — that we were putting our customers first and not treating people like numbers. With basically $0 invested in marketing, we grew and grew and grew. Friends referred friends who referred friends. In 2004 I gave up consulting and went into this full-time.

You may have already known most of that story. I’ve said it a lot. But here’s what you don’t know. During that entire time, and still to this day, I engage in a very personal debate about whether I deserve all this. The crux of the matter is that I feel like I don’t deserve to be successful. (This is really difficult to even type…sigh.) Therefore, little pieces of Simpli fall apart. Those pieces are focused around the money aspect of Simpli: Our billing system sucks. Our website is difficult to order from. We don’t bill most of our customers properly, even when the debt from our upstream providers piles up and we’re not able to make the ends meet. And even when my employees get frustrated with me because they work long hours and because we can’t afford to hire new people. They’re all symptoms of the same problem: I’m afraid.

Let me tell you what my greatest fear is. My greatest fear is that all of our customers leave and I am left dirt poor, with no money (I have personal debt too, because I pay myself this ridiculously low salary from Simpli) and no place to live and I’ll have to go back to Indiana and face my parents, who really didn’t believe I could do this in the first place, and see some look in my mom’s eyes that said “I told you so, Erica. I told you you wouldn’t make it.” I have nightmares about this.

I get angry about my personal financial situation and about Simpli’s. And throughout all that, I battle constantly with which upstream provider bills to pay and which personal expenses to pay. All of this could be solved by billing our customers properly, getting investors, or making better hires. Instead, I filled my days with busywork (until my staff forced me to hire an office manager) or read blogs instead of doing things that really mattered to myself or my company.

I have to face reality before I throw either myself or my company off a cliff. I’m writing this because I want you to understand that the life of a CEO is not all glitz and glory. Even CEOs of $100 million+ companies have to get over fears, and I can tell you that those fears are multiplied in an intense way because the livelihood of other grown adults depend on the decisions you make. This is a big reason why companies tend to innovate less as they grow larger. Put simply, the people at the top are afraid. They’re afraid of alienating current customers or of losing stock values. And some of them, I think, have fears like mine. They’re simply paralyzed because they’re afraid it will all melt away someday…especially if they build the companies themselves, or like me, they’re afraid to really take the reins and run with what they’ve built. Why? Because what if it fails?

I am coming out on this blog and stating that I have this fear. It needs to be said. More CEOs need to act like human beings. We need to admit that we all have fears and nightmares and days when we think life or work is going to completely fall apart and we’ll wake up and realize that our businesses were just some cosmic joke and that we really have nothing. Those days suck. Let’s communicate about that.

What am I going to do about it? The same thing anyone with fear needs to do…get over it! I can no longer manage this company from a position of fear. I can’t manage it based on what we have and don’t have today. I must manage it based on where I see it in the future. I must create an amazing company on paper and then work backwards from that to where we are today. I cannot manage it based on hiring employees to fill gaps we have today. I must hire employees to fill the positions we need to grow and be profitable tomorrow, based on my vision for a highly successful future for both myself and Simpli.

Overall, I like being a CEO. But it is not easy. Each decision I make regarding my business affects hundreds of people. If I make a mistake, or say something wrong, I must be humble and apologize. But the reverse also applies. When I do something right, or my employees or customers do something amazing, I have to be the first one up there acknowledging it and thanking them.

I have a piece of paper on my bathroom mirror at home that says “Just say THANK YOU!” So…thank you to my customers, employees, and friends…and thank you to those who used to be customers or employees, too. I am grateful for all of you, and I promise you that I will lose this fear and lead Simpli from here on out. I will create a picture of where Simpli should be and focus all my effort there…and you will be part of a remarkable change from a little homegrown side project (circa 2001) to a $1 million per year revenue, successful business in 2007. I owe it to you to be the successful visionary you all see in me. I will make my dreams come true.

P.S. Simpli now has a blog at http://simpliblog.com — you can keep track of corporate happenings over there.

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO, asserts that datacenters are doomed in his latest blog post, asking “Why bother with datacenters at all?”

As the owner of a web hosting company with a significant amount of datacenter space, owner of several Sun servers, and as a former Sun employee, my take on this is “I’m really glad I sold my Sun stock.” Schwartz clearly has no idea what his own customers are doing with the servers Sun sells them, or why Sun is really struggling in its core “big iron” market. He must have not taken a datacenter tour lately or priced out space in a datacenter (hint: prices are increasing rapidly as space fills up.)

First, I agree with Jonathan on one key point (apparently the only point in his blog entry that is based on actual analysis.) He says, “At least from our internal analysis, the availability of IT infrastructure is inversely correlated to foot traffic. The more people allowed in a datacenter, the more likely they are to kick a cord out of the wall, break something trying to fix it, or just bump into things…. As the best systems administrators will tell you, the most reliable services are built from infrastructure allowed to fail in place, with resilient systems architecture taking the place of hordes of eager datacenter operators.”

Right. Schwartz is correct in this point — people in datacenters are generally not a good idea because human error comes into play much more often in that scenario. But to extrapolate that this means datacenters are not needed is absurd. This in the face of news that Google is building a huge datacenter in Oregon and Microsoft is building a huge datacenter in Washington. And, if you ask around here in the Valley, you’ll find new datacenters opening all the time.

So why will datacenters continue to be relevant? Simple — economies of scale. Building out 10Gbit of pipeline to the middle of nowhere is expensive. It’s also more expensive to build out 1 T1 (1.5Mbit) to 100 locations with 1 server in each location than it is to build out 4 redundant 100Mbit connections to 4 major datacenters and putting 25 servers in each location. Not only is it cheaper, but you get more bandwidth and better connectivity to every server in the datacenter scenario… and much more flexibility should you find yourself at max capacity in a year and needing to build out more servers, space, and add additional bandwidth.

Power, space, and bandwidth (connectivity) are all cheaper when purchased in bulk quantities… and they’re all cheaper when you’re next to the power plant and next to a SONET (fiber) ring. I agree that fewer datacenters will be built out in downtown areas in the future. Datacenters will be built where there are 3 things that come together:

1. Cheap-ish labor. Remote hands/reboot monkeys can be there 24×7 to provide security and do anything that needs doing in the datacenter for $10/hour or less.
2. Cheap power. Google building their datacenter in Oregon next to a hydroelectric dam, for instance… and a couple huge datacenter installs in Las Vegas, where power is cheap. Here in the Bay Area, there’s a whole street full of datacenters coming online in Santa Clara, where there is a co-op providing much cheaper power than PG&E can provide.
3. Availability of large amounts of bandwidth. What amazes me the most about Schwartz’s latest post is that Sun’s entire motto used to be “The network is the computer.” Look at Google releasing an office suite, for instance. What about salesforce.com? Web-based email? Where does Sun think these services come from? As the number of web-based services continues to grow, and their quality continues to increase, more and more companies will be subscribing to these services. These services are particularly tailored toward small business, a market that hires 70% of the employees in the U.S. but a market that Sun has never understood. Sun was always about Big Business. But small businesses drive the market forward, and most innovations come from the small business side. If Google et. al. can make office suites and email over the web work like email and office suites do today on our PCs, a huge market will open up.

What is behind that market? DATACENTERS!

What boggles my mind is how I know this and how Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, didn’t seem to get that message. I know this because we have hundreds of customers who are using our datacenter space to provide services over the web that would normally be relegated to a back-office server somewhere. Companies don’t want those back-office servers any more. They don’t want to pay IT staff to maintain them and they don’t want everything to be offline if one crappy desktop gets its power cord kicked out (exactly the same scenario that Schwartz mentioned in his blog post.) That’s why they’re putting servers in datacenters! We get calls like that so often that I’d say there is easily a $10M/year (yes, ten million dollars a year!) business in providing that sort of outsourced IT to companies. Now here’s the kicker. I said $10M/year. I think there’s a $10M/year business in providing that to companies in Santa Clara county alone. Providing it nationally? It’s worth billions! No question about it. Where do you think IBM Global Services gets so much money?

I have no idea what makes Sun so blind to this market. Perhaps it’s because they tend to ignore small businesses (as mentioned above.) It’s the smallest businesses (fewer than 10 people) that are demanding this. They are screaming for someone to come in and put their Exchange/Novell/groupware/file sharing services/website on a few redundant servers in a datacenter (and then back it all up to another datacenter) and then give them a private leased T1, T3, etc. back to their offices, and a smallish connection to the Internet to serve files out, serve a website out, and serve outgoing email. And they’re willing to pay thousands of dollars a month to have someone do it, because paying a company $5000-$8000 a month to do this is cheaper than hiring one or two IT people! The companies that successfully pull of this migration will make millions and millions of dollars.

So why not Simpli? Well, we’re in a slightly different market. But we’re still looking into it, because the demand is so high. It will take a lot of engineering talent to pull it off. And it takes a lot of staff resources to set up this infrastructure. The big question for this new company owner is: why use Sun servers to power your huge datacenter when you can use cheaper Intel or AMD-based servers running whatever you want? The Web 2.0 industry already knows this, and it’s why Sun missed the bandwagon there too. I’m amazed that Sun doesn’t see this, but with those “big business” blinders that Sun has, they would never acknowledge this market. Someone will, though, and Sun will become even more irrelevant than it is today.