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What can kill Java?

The new programming language must now dodge some serious land mines

By William Blundon, JavaWorld.com, 08/01/96

In the first two years of the Second World War, the allies found themselves in retreat across a broad front. Most news was bad news, or worse, as Britain rapidly found itself alone, facing the world's most formidable military machine. The situation first began to reverse itself in November 1942 in North Africa. Facing Erwin Rommel's beleaguered Afrika Corps, Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery led a devastating series of attacks against combined German and Italian armies; these have become known as the Battle of El Alamein. The result was a decisive victory for the allied armies, and a growing sense of confidence in Britain. Winston Churchill brought home the meaning of this victory in a famous speech. "Now we have not reached the end;" he said, "we have not even reached the beginning of the end; but we have perhaps, reached the end of the beginning."

In 1996, the momentum behind Java is formidable. It is impossible to read an article in the technical press that does not describe another commitment to Java, another new product based on the language, or another customer success because of the environment. Despite this early success, Java has not yet reached "the end of the beginning" and there are many opportunities for it to fail, or at least fall short of its true potential.

Java can be damaged by friend and foe alike. In particular, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Intel, and the Unix computer vendors can all significantly slow the adoption and limit the evolution of the language. Some of these companies can do damage intentionally and for strategic advantage; some can do so through ineptitude or miscalculation.

Sun Microsystems: make it up in volume

Traditionally, Sun has done an excellent job of using software as a loss leader to sell computers. In the mid-1980s Sun jumped ahead of the other workstation vendors in part by "owning" Berkeley Unix and providing free access to its extensions like NFS. Licensing software at no charge became a major point of differentiation for Sun, as it became known as the expert Unix software and the definer of standards.

In the Internet world, distributing free software is a tactic employed by most competitive companies. The prevalent theory is that to succeed in the long term, a company must attempt to own a product or market segment by establishing itself as a de facto standard as early as possible. Once established, it should be easy to convert millions of users to paying customers (at least in theory). While Sun has successfully used a variant of this strategy, it has really never used free software as a way to sell software. Sun's software revenues have always fallen short of its technical prowess.

Java will help Sun sell lots of servers, but the company has yet to prove that it can sell software as well as mainstream software companies do. This creates a potential problem for Java. For it to win, there must be one Java: one language definition, one virtual machine, and one process by which the definition is enhanced or extended.

 

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