Sun’s big cheese, Scott McNealy, never was one for keeping his cards close to his chest. On January 13th McNealy was supposed to be concentrating on the launch of his company’s latest line of Unix workstations, but couldn’t resist drawing attention to a Java ace up his sleeve. No-one seems to want to speculate about who Sun’s new partner might be, but our sister but our sister publication Software Futures isn’t so timid. Given McNealy’s reported choice of words, it is predicting that he’s talking about Intel Corp. What other company would qualify for the superlatives McNealy awarded, given that the likes of Microsoft and IBM have already made their positions on Java abundantly clear? We know that Sun and Intel have cozied up to get Solaris running on Intel’s forthcoming Merced chip, the publication says. We know that putting Java in silicon is just about the best way to rid it of its reputation for sloth. So it reckons we’re about to hear that Intel will put a Java virtual machine in silicon, in one of its future CPUs. That really would be something to put a smile on McNealy’s face. Other observers say that would wreck Sun’s own Java-on-tin chip strategy and we should be looking for an out-of-court settlement with Microsoft. We asked IBM Corp and it said well who is bigger than us? Quite. We do know that Sun will this week announce a major new Java/e-commerce site plus a new Enterprise Credentials benchmarking program it says will help customers better evaluate technologies for building business networks.
