Sun Microsystems Inc co-founder Bill Joy believes users would be benefiting from much more advanced technologies if the US, Japan and Europe had sat down and agreed on a common standard for wireless telephony. It’s not that Joy is a fan of the committee process, but in this case it would have made sense he says. Instead, he says, we are burdened with equipment that for the most part works in only one of those geographical areas.
But is the same true of Java? Would it be better now to take Java to an open standards process and let Sun, Microsoft, Hewlett- Packard and others come to define one. No! he says, because Microsoft will never agree with it. All it apparently wants to do is discredit Java. Why don’t they go and do something useful, he asks?
Joy believes that Microsoft will be forced to the table on a common document format however. He thinks that Sun’s acquisition and promotion of the Star Division StarOffice suite which is the functional equivalent and compatible with MS Office, plus the rise of XML and increasing need to be able to exchanging documents electronically, means that some kind of standard process is bound to be squeezed into being soon.
