JAVAONE: Sun's second act?

Reflections of a former Sun evangelist

By Max Goff, JavaWorld.com, 07/05/04

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When F. Scott Fitzgerald observed in his (unfinished) final novel, The Last Tycoon, that there are no second acts in American lives, he was himself struggling with the pitfalls of a failed reinvention. Famous at 23, washed up at 40, dead at 44, Fitzgerald's life epitomized artistic burnout and provides a cautionary tale that still haunts the American zeitgeist these many generations later. For Fitzgerald-the-screenwriter, life was never as bold or as sweet as it was during the height of his novelist adventures. The question that kept occurring to me at this year's JavaOne was rooted in Fitzgerald's last season in Hollywood: are second acts ever performed by US companies? Because, for Sun Microsystems, the curtain on the first act has most assuredly fallen.

End of Act One

I entered Moscone Center for the 2004 JavaOne Conference rather skeptical. My attendance record claims all but two JavaOne conferences: I missed the first, taking my first Java-related assignment at Sun a few months after that very first JavaOne. I also missed the 2003 conference, having left Sun in November 2002 (after nearly 9 years at the firm and 20 in software, I needed time away). But I have attended all other instantiations of JavaOne at Moscone Center. This year, the first as an independent consultant, I did not attend to serve, but to observe.

Having been inside, as it were, I have witnessed first-hand the "behind-the curtain" angst that necessarily occurs prior to any major event. That coupled with the fall from grace that has defined Sun since (coincidently) Bush was elected gave me considerable fodder for a skeptic's fare. And if signs of decay were all I wished to observe, there were ample to sample:

Less attendance: I estimate there were (maybe) half as many attendees as there were at JavaOne's peak—the '99 and '00 events burst the doors off Moscone. Although McNealy's keynote suggested that 14,000 attended this year, I doubt the accuracy of that estimate. If there were 9,000, I would be surprised.
Fewer give-aways: No iButton-powered JavaRing. No PDA. No backpack on wheels. The attendees got a small shoulder bag, and that was about it. Once known for cool chachkas, JavaOne has slipped several notches in the give-away department.
Fewer supporting partners: The pavilion floor was nowhere near filled with startup Java ventures as compared to past years.
Fewer industry-molding revelations: A dribble of open source announcements (Java 3D and Project Looking Glass) were all that Sun could muster.

I heard the fat lady warming up.

I ran into a number of old friends and acquaintances from Sun, many of whom are still with the company. The giddy, "glad-to-be-here" temperaments of the dot-com heyday were entirely absent from Sun personnel, replaced by somber, reality-tested mantles of "survivor," having witnessed a bevy of now-ritual RIF events. Three years of profitless results must test the faith of even the most ardent believer.

It was interesting to see the pavilion floor layout, with Sun booths dead center and Sun's now red-shirted support staff tightly compressed in a "circle-the-wagons" configuration. The space between Sun booths was literally a third that of all other pavilion participants, making it at least uncomfortable to enter the inner sanctums of Sun's offerings—clearly an operational choice made with ironic strategic overtones. Avoidance was the only rational choice for attendees, which, I suspect, most accomplished. It was simply too difficult to get inside the Sun displays to speak with a Sun booth representative. The self-defeating subtleties didn't stop there...