This evening, I was attending a dinner hosted by Sun Microsystems on the business and computing demands of Web 2.0. It was held at the Town Hall Restaurant in San Francisco. The event enjoyed a surprisingly good turn out (for a Monday!) with reporters from BusinessWeek, Wall Street Journal, PC World as well as my friend Tom Sanders who's now back in Holland at WebWereld (i.e. WebWorld in English). Even Tim O'Reilly aka Monsieur Web 2.0 himself showed up.

After the cocktails, the event started with a brief intro of Web 2.0 by Marten Mickos, the senior VP of Sun's database group (pictured with Sun CEO, Jonathan Schwartz) and currently one of the busiest Scandinavian in the planet!
Although short, Mickos' remarks went right to the point.

First about Sun's acquisition of MySQL: "it's a hectic time... it's like joining a large start-up". Then on to the secret behind Web 2.0: open source.

"Web 2.0: Fail fast, Scale fast. It sounds funny but it's so true about modern business. First of all it's very Darwinian in that you have to try, try and error. And that you have to experiment at very low cost. Because most experiments fail. And you have to be very fast figuring out wether it will fail or not... But then when it doesn't. When it's a YouTube, a Facebook... then you need to scale faster than you could ever imagine... Open Source is the only technology that can span both of those needs. So it's completely free of charge when you're experiment and you test it... and then it scales with you", Mickos said.

What does MySQL and Nike have in common? According to Mickos, they both make shoes... but they don't actually run in it! Probably another of Mickos' colourful Scandinavian jokes!

"Open source is so good for Web 2.0. This is the engine behind Web 2.0. And there's absolutely no cost of experimentation. And when you see it really may work, you can take those piece of technology and just duplicate them".

To close, Mickos pointed to the Web's explosive growth since the "Tech Bubble".

"We now have 160 million host names on the Web. That's about 4 times more than during the bubble. So, if you think the bubble was something unreal, then we have now four times of that. And it just keeps growing".