The Community is Always Right

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Palo Alto, California – There’s no bigger word than ‘community’ in Silicon Valley today and there’s probably no more visible an advocate for the power of the community than Sun Microsystem’s COO, Jonathan Schwartz. While Sun may not be as synonymous with the monetization of communities as say eBay or Google are, Schwartz – as the preeminent corporate blogger in Silicon Valley – is certainly visible and vocal enough on the topic to make you believe that Sun is betting the company on the power of its community more than the power of its processors

Speaking at the Churchill Club in Palo Alto this week, Schwartz reasserted his belief that to be a great business in today’s ‘flat-world’ economy, you have to have a community – and then sell valuable services to it. That’s the rationale, he explained, for Sun’s great Solaris give-away (three million licenses and counting). After all, by giving away all those licenses (not to mention all those Java downloads too), Sun, like eBay, Yahoo et al, will have harvested an enviable crop of email addresses which, over time, could become a loyal community.

However, I can’t help but think that that’s where the similarity between Sun and its Internet brethren ends.

After all, while Google and Yahoo can make large piles of cash simply by giving advertisers access to their loyal community of eye-balls, money isn’t earned quite that easily by enterprise computing companies. Sun doesn’t make money by letting other people sell to its customers. It makes money by selling to them itself.

And yet Sun has uncovered a gem, even if Schwartz doesn’t seem able yet to articulate how his company intends to profit from that gem of a community it is building. Perhaps Schwartz should stop struggling to come up with the answer himself and turn instead to his corporate communications team for counsel. If they’re on the ball, I’m sure those guys and gals are chomping at the bit to get at that community – and not just to email them Sun’s latest newsletter.

While Schwartz is busy figuring out what to build and sell to his community, Sun’s comms folks could be busy tapping into a unique resource. After all, three million customers is a heck of an advisory board. Three million customers is a heck of a test bed for R&D too.

Yes, online communities can be powerful – even if you’re not an Internet company – but rather than seeking to monetize those communities directly, companies should start thinking about how to communicate with their community in order to develop better products, better marketing programs – and who knows – maybe even better margins.