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Interview: 'Java and Jini will be in everything'
Sun Chief Strategy Officer Bill Raduchel talks to IDG about the future of Java and Jini -- and Y2K
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Raduchel: I signed the contract. Scott [McNealy, Sun's chairman, CEO and president] went to AOL in 1994/1995 and talked to Steve Case [AOL Chairman and CEO], saying we should cooperate, but we had a hard time of it. At a December 1997 meeting, Steve asked Miles Gilburne [AOL's senior vice president, corporate development] and me to see about working together and we eventually focused on e-commerce. Miles suggested AOL acquiring Netscape and for Sun to partner with Netscape, bringing AOL's eyeballs together with Sun's servers.
IDGNS: What's Sun's take on speech recognition software? Both Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. are investing in that area.
Raduchel: We're looking at speech. It's an area where we've tended to rely on third parties, I'm not sure where we play in it, but speech is on our radar screen. Speech by itself is not a great advantage, it's not easier than touch screens.
The question is: What's user friendly? When I can say to a computer "Find the way home" and it can do it, then I'll really be interested. We're a long way from that, I can't do that yet from the keyboard and have the computer process it.
IDGNS: Would there be any technology in Asia Sun would be interested in?
Raduchel: We're a pretty polyglot company and are very open to ideas. For example, our workstations are built in Taiwan by Mitac. We understand Asia's potential, it will come back very strongly. Ten years ago, when I met with Asian users, there was a very different set of comments [from their US peers], they were one to four years behind in IT thinking, that's not true today. The only big difference is that Asia lags behind the US in terms of Net penetration.
The Net is such a leveling factor, it will drive the world to a smaller number of languages, perhaps five to ten languages. There'll be English, Japanese, and Chinese, but will there still be French and German? There will be better automatic translation, but in a lot of business-to-business e-commerce, language won't be very important.
IDGNS: What do you think will happen on January 1, 2000?
Raduchel: There will be a significant amount of hassle for people. It's a cold, not a heart attack. Small businesses will be hit, but lots of fixes are pretty trivial. We should have seen a lot of problems on January 1, 1999, but we saw nothing.
Last fall, I was at a meeting where a very responsible person stood up and said "I think we have to worry about machine tools." When was the last time you checked a lathe for a date? Two-thirds of the people in the meeting room thought Y2K would be a major catastrophe. The former chief scientist of one of the top computer companies said we should all take 0,000 in cash out of the bank in case of anything happening on January 1, 2000.
I don't want to downplay the issue. I can't believe the doom scenario. A friend of mine, a CIO [chief information officer], as a joke, asked his CEO about finding funds to invest in the "September 9, 1999 issue." It was a joke, but the CEO said, "How many millions do you need, we'll have to amend our SEC filing," and so on.
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