Sun's Gosling On the Java Evolution

VARBusiness:How has your original vision for Java changed or evolved over the years? Any big surprises?

A: The thing that's hard about that question is that there are just so many interesting things. It's sort of a weird thing because when we were starting to think about building this thing that evolved into Java, we wrote up a kind of business plan document and in it we put a whole lot of usage scenarios. And at the time that we were doing that I sort of thought of it as more an exercise in science fiction than planning. And the truly amazing thing for me is that that exercise in science fiction actually came true. People are doing essentially all of the things that we talked about in that document.

VARBusiness: What were some of those things?

A: They were all around what people could do with sort of embedded control systems and cable television and cell phones and infrastructure work. A lot of it was really heavily centered on what happened around consumers and real people in the street who used [Java] for everyday things. Although they often don't recognize exactly what's going on, they just use their cell phone or they go to some Web site, and it just works. The fact that there's Java under the hood is sort of not relevant because they're getting their job done. And I guess if I'm surprised by anything it would really be the combination of breadth and depth to which this has gone. You talk to folks doing science and it's all over the place: it's the ground-based control system for the Mars Rover, it's the control software for the KEK telescopes, it's -- people just do the most amazing things.

VARBusiness: Why do you think Sun hasn't capitalized on the stewardship of Java versus other J2EE platform players like IBM and BEA?

A: I think that we have capitalized on it. But we've capitalized on it in a different way. Our goal was really more to create a healthy market for software into which we could sell hardware. And if you go back seven or eight years, the sort of nightmare scenario for us was one where every machine was required to run Windows NT and there was no way that, for a variety of reasons, we could really build Windows NT machines in any sort of competitively useful way. And what Java has done for Sun is really make the market for hardware and the market for software somewhat decoupled so that you can make a software decision independent of a hardware decision. We had many decision points along the road as to whether we should do things that would further direct revenue gain from selling software versus indirect revenue through making the software market healthy. And we tended to predominantly favor making the market healthy because there's the general strategic view, that having a small part of a big pie is better than having a big part of a small pie. And so we tend to do whatever we can to make the pie bigger even if we don't own the whole thing. And I think that that has actually worked well.

VARBusiness: By "healthier" you mean more competitive, right?

A: Right. The fact that in the .Net market there is no competition because there is only one supplier means that it is an inherently unhealthy market. If you are a purchasing agent, the thing that you hate the most is to go into a single supplier situation. And the Java world doesn't have that problem. There is competition because there are multiple suppliers.

VARBusiness: And Sun wants to be one of the competitors in this market?

A: Yes, we do. Although if you wind back the clock a few years, we were actually trying to not be competitors in the market. We really weren't putting much energy at all into being an application server vendor or anything like that. We were putting more of our energy into supporting people who were trying to be app server vendors.

VARBusiness: Are you at all chagrined at how successfully IBM has parlayed Java as part of its business reinvention?

A: I don't think it would be chagrin; I think it would be more pride that Java has really driven a lot of what they do so that now IBM customers are Sun customers. You look at some of the IBM software products like DB2 and WebSphere, and I'm not sure what the sales numbers are today, but the Sun platform has been a very big platform for them to sell onto. A lot of their software ships on Sun hardware. In the case of BEA, it's really well known that [their] primary platform for many years was Solaris Sparc and then their product and customer base grew to the point where they selected a second platform.

VARBusiness: What you're saying then is that Java is really a tool to sell more Sun hardware?

A: We see ourselves really as a systems company where the hardware and the software in some sense are indistinguishable. And it's really impossible to do hardware without software and there are a lot of advantages to doing software when you can also do hardware. The fact that we can design a lot of these things together has some really huge advantages for us. So, for example, a lot of the manageability features that go on in our app server and [operating system] are directly enabled by facilities that we were able to put into the hardware. So yes, at some level the revenue tends to come predominantly from the hardware but if you look at the sales process, the sales pitch, what we actually present to customers and what customers really buy, it is a system.

VARBusiness: Will Sun ever relinquish licensing control over Java?

A: [Control] is incredibly loose these days. About the only thing of any substance in the licenses is that people agree to interoperate. And there's certification. One of the things that's sort of a problem with standards in general is that a standard is a stack of paper with no meaning. You can be compliant with a standard just by saying that you are. And in the Java world if you want to say that you are a compliant Java implementation, there's a huge set of tests to meet and it's quite a process to get certified. We're pretty anal about that because one of the big values of Java to the developer community is that it is interoperable across all these different platforms.

VARBusiness: What do you think of Microsoft's .Net?

A: They're kind of late to the game. Microsoft hasn't been doing enterprise software for a long time and it shows. One of the problems with talking about .Net is that it's a lot of different pieces -- there are things like the programming language that they did. It's really hard for me to criticize because it is such a direct rip-off of Java. They haven't committed much in the way of acts of original thought. Then there's the whole SOAP/XML thing and there's a lot of good to be said for XML. It was kind of originated at Sun anyway. And some of it sounds somewhat humorous to me because it's as though they invented distributed computing when they came out with SOAP. Completely ignoring the fact that people have been doing distributed computing for a couple of decades. The thing that [Microsoft does] the best with is their tools. In the .Net world you can say that [tools] make easy things easy and hard things are impossible. But in the J2EE world, hard things are possible and easy things can be hard to do, although people have been developing new waves of tools [from Sun, BEA and IBM] that are making the J2EE world as easy to use as .Net. And that's actually one of the interesting strengths is that there are multiple players in this all taking sort of multiple approaches to making the J2EE world very, very easy to use.

VARBusiness:What would convince an ISV to go with Sun and Sun's tools versus IBM and it's tools or another J2EE vendor?

A: Well, you have to sit down with the products and try them out. And at some level we're perfectly happy to sell Sun hardware to people using IBM's tools and IBM's software. Now why you would you buy a J2EE solution versus .Net is completely obvious. J2EE is the more mature technology, it has better scalability, it's a market not a product. But if you try to do comparisons within the J2EE world, to be honest I really couldn't rattle off the list of differences between say, WebSphere and the Sun app server.

VARBusiness: How are trying to attract ISVs?

A: We do a huge amount with the ISV community particularly with positioning against the .Net world and getting people to develop within the Java world so that we can participate in that equipment market. We do huge amounts of evangelism, we've got technical conferences that are held all over the world, we've got the one huge technical conference (JavaOne) where we just lecture after lecture, there's all kinds of support programs.

VARBusiness: ISVs tend to want to go with the platform provider that has the biggest market for their applications. What other attributes make a systems provider like Sun a good ISV partner?

A: Well, certainly at the end of the day the ISVs have to be concerned about their financial well being. If you just go with a partner because you like them despite how the revenue model works out, you're almost certainly making a mistake. The size of the Java market and the J2EE market is so large that we really don't have a problem with that. It's very, very easy for ISVs to make their money in that market. And one of the nice things about the way that Java works is that because it does work across platforms, if an ISV makes the J2EE decision, they're not cutting themselves off from the Microsoft platform. J2EE works on the Microsoft platform beautifully well. Whereas if you make the .net decision, you cut yourself off from everything except the Microsoft platform.