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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 3 of 5

An analyst at the Gartner Group who chose to remain anonymous commented that the purpose of JavaSoft is not and should not be to make money. "They are acting as a provider of Sun technology. The business won't work if they think they're going into a software venture where people make money from Java applications... That scenario doesn't make sense for Sun. The purpose of JavaSoft is to build Java into an OS. How they're going to make money isn't clear. What is moving Java now is Netscape."

This analyst is not convinced that starting a separate company was a wise business move, but at the same time he sees the extent to which Java was and continues to be tied to Sun as a problem.

"The whole appeal of Java is its platform independence. A Java-based OS is cool as long as everyone's running it. What isn't smart is to build an OS that everyone has to use in order to run Java applets. Then you're back facing the same problem. Nothing is `platform independent' if the platform has to be Java," the Gartner Group analyst said.

As far as making money is concerned, the Gartner analyst envisions JavaSoft continuing to market developer's tools, just-in-time compilers and so on. He saw the deal with Microsoft as "...a foregone conclusion." Microsoft's agreement with Sun to develop and maintain the reference implementation of Java for all Windows platforms (announced on March 12) was necessary for them as providers of technology in order to keep abreast of the tide. The point of pushing Java technology -- for both Sun and Microsoft -- is not that they will build applications and thereby create profit streams from Java products, but to change the technological playing field.

While Java has shown a great deal of promise, and certainly seems to be a technology that has arrived at the right moment in the technological space-time continuum, aside from a few notable and noteworthy business applications (see "Java in the Real World", a story in JavaWorld magazine) its real merits as the basis of a much-talked about (but yet-to-be-realized) Internet OS, and the limits of its capabilities -- particularly in the personal productivity area -- have yet to be tested.

"In the past, with any new desktop technology, it wasn't until a compelling personal productivity platform arrived that actually took advantage of the wire that anyone could tell its value," said Kannegaard. "When you see it, like when CPM people first saw Visicalc, the first thing you think is `wow, we should have thought of that...' The same has held true for every new platform. It took Lotus to prove the value of DOS, Excel to show the value of the Mac OS..."

For the home market, Kannegaard envisions Java as the first seed in the evolution of a group of applications that are not browsers. "There's a lot you can do besides browse and click on hyperlinks. I see three categories coming: news; entertainment; and publishing media of various kinds. There will be a virtual newsstand where you can look at categories of magazines, for instance, and then choose the category you're interested in -- sports, for example -- and then see the selections in that area."

 

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