By Jonathan Schwartz

There's an interesting phenomenon in the computer marketplace, which strikes some as counterintuitive: If you double the performance of a machine, customers don't buy half as many, they tend to double their order. Same goes for utilization: If you can double server utilization via Solaris containers or VMWare, people don't buy fewer computers — they buy more.

The value of innovation, at least to our core customers, is growing so fast that if the price declines, the overall return (value/price) goes through the roof — encouraging a feedback loop. Moore's Law and free software drive relative pricing down, and customers accelerate their growth.

We can prove it.

We've had impressive share gains across our systems business — from our aggressively priced Niagara (sorry, Sun Fire X4500) servers to our multi-billion dollar systems. And although I'm thrilled to see our share gains, I'd like to see more growth among customers that don't buy $250,000 at a time, but more like $2,500 — startups and small companies. Granted, we are making headway with a few very cool startups, but we have work to do in a market that daily redefines the network.

So we organized an "unconference" for startups in the Silicon Valley area. We had solid, even overflow attendance at this event. Nearly all of the feedback was positive. But there was a troubling, and consistent message. It usually went like this, "Wow, this is a great idea... thank you, Sun. But hey, why are you guys here? I thought you built big expensive stuff that ran in banks?quot;