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JavaSoft wrestles with success

Sun's newest company scrambles to hire staff, switch locations, release products, cut deals, create a business plan

By Erica Liederman, JavaWorld.com, 04/15/96

Page 2 of 5

"Our focus after getting the platform built and licensed is to widen the scope of class libraries and build a better API. Then once that happens, Java programmers can start to do something really interesting," Kannegaard said. "We have the best-of-breed players signing up to help. Companies like Macromedia and SGI are working on multimedia toolkits. And there are many more coming down the pike...

"Right now, JavaSoft is like a volunteer fire department. We'll take anybody inside Sun or outside who wants to be involved. There are maybe 300 people with Java tee shirts. Of those, about 100 are on the payroll."

When asked to comment about the departure of three members of the original Java team (Arthur Van Hoff and Sami Shaio, software engineers, and Kim Polese, Java's senior product manager), Kannegaard said: "There's a misconception that the Java team left to build Java applications. Three people left; 97 stayed. James Gosling [Java's primogenitor, a Sun engineer and Fellow since Sun's early days] is still here. Of course you always have mixed feelings when good people leave, but the fact is, they've gone off to become ISVs. There are certainly no people better qualified to develop Java applications. They're talented. They may be the best Java programmers out there now. And all you can say is: go off and make Java applications and keep broadening the scope of its use."

Giving away the razor so people will buy the blades

Industry analysts, while no less enthusiastic about the possibilities of the technology, recognize that the jury is still out when it comes to the viability of a Java business unit.

Donald DePalma, a senior analyst with the Software Strategy Service at Forrester Research, sees JavaSoft's mission as necessarily falling into three main areas of focus. They must consolidate what Sun has done around Java and make sure that SunSoft and Java are at arm's length; they must make sure that Java fever doesn't abate and take advantage of all the free press that they can through marketing programs and consortia to keep Java's presence as much at the forefront as it is now; and they must decrease Java's association with Unix, making it as cross-platform as the architecture promises.

As for the technology itself, DePalma said: "Is it great? So far, it's the only alternative to Microsoft's vision of the world. It's the best hope of everyone else ... When you get away from the hype, you end up with a group who falls into the camp of `the enemy of my enemy is my friend...' As a technology, it's C++ stripped down, but it retains the benefits of the object paradigm. It makes use of distributed objects, simple inheritance, assembling components. It runs on both server and client, and has the ability to create a small footprint of interpreted code. Furthermore, it does just-in-time compiling ... The problem is the phenomenal amount of hype. Dave Litwack, the president of Powersoft said they are working on an application called `Decaf' -- Java without the hype."

 

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