Contrarian Minds: Greg Papadopoulos

Why Sun's chief techology officer is driving a strategy of radical simplification.

By Al Riske

06.May.04--Gray-haired but still boyish at 44, Greg Papadopoulos has been busy lately delivering the kind of contrarian viewpoints Sun is famous for.

Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight64, put it this way: "Everyone else is saying the world is flat and Sun is saying, 'No, it's round.'"

As chief technology officer, Papadopoulos guides Sun's roughly $2-billion-a-year R&D portfolio with an eye toward doing things differently. "We don't accept the conventional wisdom or the status quo as being the answer," he says.

A veteran of 20 years in the high-tech industry (the past 10 with Sun), Papadopoulos likes to shake things up. In fact, he once stood before the Microprocessor Forum and declared that "Microprocessors are dead."

His point: We will soon be moving toward "microsystems" and eventually "micronetworks."

In an interview with CNET, Papadopoulos said that "the biggest piece of crap going around right now is that this is a mature industry and innovation doesn't matter."

Back in his Menlo Park office, he sips a large cafe latte with two sugars, speaks rapidly, and laughs easily.

Mention Nicholas Carr, the business writer who penned "IT Doesn't Matter" for the Harvard Business Review, and Papadopoulos will concede that Carr is half right.

"In some sense we're delivering both messages to people. If you look at some of our discussions around cost and complexity ... there's gratuitous money being spent on things that are not adding value or positive differentiation," he says. "So let's drive cost out of that and allow you to invest in the wave front of interesting things. Let's go automate all this mundane datacenter stuff with N1 and go invest in Auto-ID [radio-frequency identification tags]."

Papadopoulos gets a gleam in his eye whenever he talks about new technologies, but the gleam doesn't blind him to practical considerations. "You not only have to do things differently, but you have to do them right -- you have to meet some core needs of customers that are not being satisfied elsewhere."

That's exactly what Sun's latest contrarian strategies are all about.

"We happen to have had insight into what those core needs are," Papadopoulos says. "We believe that all of computing has become way too complex and way too costly."

He calls it "Emperor's News Clothes complexity" because no one else seems willing to point out the obvious.

Sun's strategy: radical simplification in all quarters.

"That's what we're doing with the Java Enterprise System -- radically simplifying the way people view that software layer, its stability, the cost of acquisition, licensing terms.

"With N1 we're bringing radical simplification to the datacenter through automation of a whole lot of the tasks that operators are asked to do at the network level.

"Then there's the whole Throughput Computing initiative, which says, 'You know, we really ought to radically simplify our view of what a microprocessor looks like because we'll make a whole lot more progress that way -- doing much simpler designs but replicating them, putting more on a chip.'

"Certainly if you look at Sun Ray appliances, the Java Desktop System, and the bets we placed (and the success we're having) around mobility and Java on wireless phones -- these are all simplification plays."

So what makes this strategy contrarian?

"We're doing this sweeping simplification around software, operations, processors, and system design while our competitors believe that this stuff is inherently complex and you need to throw a lot of people at it," Papadopoulos points out.

"We see services as a key part of how we deliver the product, but they don't substitute for product. They can fill in product deficiencies and lead the way in how products improve, but they're not a substitute for engineering.

"We'll manage people's equipment, but we won't just do a financial transaction, you know, moving people off of a customer's books and onto ours. That's not the way we do it.

"If you look at Sun services, the key transformation is around remote services and getting into automating that and then becoming more predictive and proactive -- changing the nature of how services are delivered."

Full of energy, Papadopoulos tends to move about his office as he talks -- standing, sitting, sipping coffee -- and seems most comfortable with a dry-erase marker in his hand and a white board in front of him.

"Customers have some hard problems that they're trying to get solved and they aren't being served by the current market," he says. "If we've read this right, we're in there helping them solve those problems and helping them differentiate themselves in their business.

"That's the transitive advantage you're supposed to get out of information technology. If I can come up with a differentiated view to IT that leads to a differentiated advantage to my customer, then the customers who adopt my view ahead of time actually end up differentiating in their marketplaces."

A quizzical look is generally all it takes for the one-time MIT professor to launch into a clarifying example.

"Take radio-frequency tags in retail. That's an area where people think there's going to be some real differentiation, so people who get that figured out -- and we've been in there early and think we understand it better than our competitors now -- can pull some customers along and say, 'Hey, let's go discover this new area of what RF tags look like and how you really get them to work. Those customers will, in theory, be able to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

"If you really want to differentiate, there will be groups of people who say, 'That's just not right.' I think we tend to, as a company, appeal to a user population that wants to move most rapidly into new ideas."