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Kim Polese talks Java

JavaSoft's former `one-person marketing department' describes why Sun `gave away the crown jewels' of Java, identifies ripe markets for today's Java developers, and discusses Java's future.

By Michael O'connell, JavaWorld.com, 04/01/96

Page 2 of 7

Moving from interactive TV to the Internet

I co-wrote a business plan about four months after I came to FirstPerson that said we have to stop doing what we were doing, which was the interactive TV consumer device market, and focus on where the real set of programmers and where the real information superhighway was and is: the network, the Internet, the intranet, and the desktop.

At that time it was a rather revolutionary concept, because two years ago, interactive TV was it. Everybody was building companies and products around that market. But it felt a lot like AI [artificial intelligence] to me in terms of the hype factor versus the reality factor. The artificial intelligence industry [experienced] tremendous excitement about the potential, but incredibly expensive investment for basically no apparent market or customer base. So that set off warning signals in my mind.

After culling up some numbers and really looking at the market data and projections and taking a reality check in general, it became obvious the Internet was really what was going to be launching the next wave of computing. And that was the perfect environment for Oak, because everything that made Oak perfect for the settop box environment, the broadband environment, also made it ideally suited for the Internet: the security, the platform independence, the dynamic code downloading [and so on].

Giving away the crown jewels

Sun, the executive staff, deserved a lot of credit for letting us run with this, because there was no guarantee that it would work, and what we were doing was giving away the crown jewels, and really opening up everything -- total source code, even the specification -- and putting an amazing investment of intellectual property out there on the Internet for all to download.

But the gamble was that basically lowering every barrier to acceptance in the developer market was what we needed to do. And that's what we did. Barrier to acceptance is price. OK, it's free. [Laughs] People were trying to charge royalties at that time. I really worked very hard on figuring out what the right business model was, and that time Kalieda, QuickTime VR (Apple's product) were extracting royalties for runtimes and it became pretty obvious to me that's a good way to kill a new language. People just won't pay royalties. I was very insistent about that, and also about getting the source code out there. Because promoting ubiquity means getting Java everywhere -- not just SPARC, not just the PC, but everywhere.

`Sexy technology'

There were a variety of areas that I really worked on. The business model was one. Lowering the barriers to adoption in the way that I've described, and availability, i.e., making it very easy to access by putting it out there for all to see. The other was making this technology sexy, because it really is sexy technology. But when you try to describe it based on its feature set, people's eyes glaze over. And there is so much there.

There are so many features that make this language environment uniquely designed for the network. The security, we talked about platform independence, the dynamic code downloading, multithreading for multimedia performance, the compact size of this thing so that it can fit into very small devices, and that the code, the byte codes themselves when they fly across the net, are very small, so that they're designed for a lightweight environment. The simplicity of the language compared to languages like C++. Garbage collection. We have features built in for robustness because the goal was to make a system that could run in a settop box without needing to reboot your settop box or your toaster oven, which you're certainly not going to do. A whole bunch of features, but when you try to reel them off, it's very difficult to understand what this thing really does.

 

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