Sun Microsystems Inc executives are on a tub-thumping tour to ram home the message that Java computing will leave conventional WinTel desktop all washed up and that it’s now ready for prime-time use in enterprise client-server environments. While Sun chief executive Scott McNealy has been evangelizing Down Under, Sun Microsystems Computer Corp boss Ed Zander’s vice-president for Internet strategy Bud Tribble has been spreading the gospel in the US. He believes Sun Microsystems Inc’s vision of Java computing will become real because of two trends: the need to bring desktop computing costs under control, and the externalization of Java-based corporate intranets. The process that Tribble has previously styled disintermediation will see internal networks, applications and content gradually opened up to customers and suppliers (CI No 2,873). Importantly, Sun now appears to have a better sense of how it will make money out of its new weapon. The key is Java’s ability to provide a strong pull for sales of Sun’s hardware lines, and not just the company’s widely-used Netra Internet servers. While Java licensing is now providing a revenue stream for Sun – a dozen or more companies have signed to integrate Java into their system software offerings – Tribble says Java’s ubiquity is more important than the license revenues it provides. Sun is also selling Java Workshop tools for creating and implementing Java, and architecture designs for the Java chips it hopes will power all kinds of network appliances and devices. Of course Sun believes Webtops will be the dominant metaphor of Java desktop computing, and further out will be selling its own commercial devices using Java chips.
File-size limit
Beyond that, there’s the potential to participate in the consumer market, Tribble notes. There’s speculation among some set-top builders that Sun may have written itself out of the market for integrated television-video-Internet devices because the lack of a maximum file size limit in Java means manufacturers of these Java-based devices will always need to attach some kind of additional storage to their low-cost configurations to accommodate Java files too big to store in the skinny memory devices. Tribble says the argument’s simply not a Java question and that the television set-top folk are going to write themselves out of the Internet market if they are going ask content providers to restrict files to a certain size. Tribble agrees that the company’s JavaSoft subsidiary is so swamped with work – and suffers a constant loss of staff to Java start-ups hoping to get rich – that it’s creating bottlenecks in the development of the company’s Java computing vision. But he argues the log-jams are now well understood and are being addressed as fast as it can get staff on to them. He says there are three distinct industry areas where the company is particularly trying to apply resources. First and most important is the creation of infrastructure and technologies to enable Java-based client-server computing. For example, Sun is working with enterprise-independent software vendors to create Java-based manufacturing software programs, components and application programming interfaces that companies will be able to deploy inside and outside of their organizations, to run not only their own businesses but to enable suppliers and customers to participate as well. These and other client-server mechanisms are what Tribble believes to be the critical pieces for use with Java clients in the client-server market. Secondly, there are companies that need support for the creation of productivity applications. Independent software vendors such as Corel Corp creating spreadsheets or word processors in Java need more full featured versions of Java’s AWT, Advanced Windowing Toolkit, plus the Java Beans application programming interfaces and classes. Of course trying to deploy Java applications in the commercial market also means that JavaSoft must implement common two- and three-dimensional, video and other multimedia interfaces as soon as it can.
