Hewlett-Packard Co has been waging a damage-limitation campaign with industry analysts, trying to shore up its one strategy, two approaches Java image. Its enterprise group is doing vanilla Java work while the embedded group has ground its own beans and sold the recipe for a ‘clean room’ embedded Java virtual machine on to Microsoft Corp which is expected to refine the flavor and send it back over to HP. Meta Group thinks the plethora of Java initiatives now underway are undermining Sun Microsystems Inc’s ability to retain control of Java. HP and Microsoft are driving their own Java appliance initiatives such as phones, set-top devices, printers, while IBM Corp is using Java primarily for connecting applications and subsystems such as CICS, Domino and DB2, not as a universal programming and development platform. Oracle and Netscape have their own Java agendas too. Meta believes discontent is mounting, and Sun’s control of Java is slipping. It thinks IBM will emerge as the leading high-end Java player, with HP and Microsoft challenging Sun for the embedded Java market. On the other hand Gartner Group sees Microsoft as the driving force behind HP’s JVM, which it’s said to need in case Java becomes indispensable for handheld devices. Viewed alongside the enterprise group’s strategy Gartner thinks the strategy is fracturing HP, not Java.
