One Step Forward, One Step Back

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

November 1, 2003 —

Sun's in trouble. It admitted to a billion-dollar boo-boo in the last quarter. HP is offering its enterprise customers twenty-five grand worth of free services to switch to Carly Fiorina's Linux servers. McNealy & Co. still can't get their Linux and open-source stories straight. And, then there's all the Java fuss.

Not all is doom and gloom, however. Acer, Gateway, Samsung, Toshiba and little known, but popular, white-box vendor Tsinghua Tongfang are now bundling the latest Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) with their Windows desktops and notebooks. With the earlier deals with Apple, Dell and HP, Sun is getting close to having the majority of new PCs arriving at customers' doors ready to run Java. As AOL and Microsoft have shown, getting your program preinstalled on PCs is half the battle in making your application popular.

And, of more immediate importance, Sun seems to be willing to work with the Eclipse Consortium. I know it's not to a Java purist's taste, but the Eclipse Framework's far faster native interface, compared with NetBeans, would make Java on the desktop a much more viable choice for development managers and their programmers.

I'm still not ready to say that Java can make a comeback on the desktop. However, if Sun and the Eclipse Consortium can come to an agreement soon, all those brand-spanking-new JVMs on all those PCs might prove the foundation for serious Java desktop applications, both commercial and home-grown.

On the other hand-you knew that was coming, didn't you!-Sun is ticking off some of its Java partners in the Java Community Process (JCP). How? By branding its new software services stack Java Enterprise System, which is both an umbrella and replacement name for Sun ONE. It's also renamed its office suite, formerly "Mad Hatter," as Java Desktop System.

Sun, of course, owns Java, and controls how the trademark is licensed and used. Until now, it's been reserved for the programming language and specifications-that is, as a technology, not as a product. Therefore, the other vendors in the JCP have not been able to use Java in their product names. Likewise, Sun has always restrained itself…until now. To engineers this isn't a major deal, but for upper management and marketing types at Sun's Java-centric competitors, this is the kind of action that may cause them to re-examine their commitment to Java.

Ironically, in the case of the Java Desktop System, there's really not a lot of Java in there. Instead, Sun is selling primarily an open-source/Linux-based desktop system with an included JVM and some bundled applications.

This underlines two other Sun problems. The first is that the Java Enterprise System and Java Desktop System names will only confuse people about Java. Remember how Microsoft used ".NET" to describe everything it made, including products that had nothing to do with .NET, such as the .NET Passport? Remember how people, even Microsoft employees, could no longer tell you what .NET meant?

I fear that unhappy situation could happen to Sun and Java. Java's a great programming language, and in J2EE it's the basis for great application servers, but it's not a desktop office suite. Branding everything .NET didn't help Microsoft. Branding everything Java won't help Sun, or Java developers, either.

The second problem is that Sun continues to embrace open-source/Linux with one hand, while trying to stab it in the back with the other. Sun, get your open-source/Linux story straight once and for all. Confused users aren't buying users, and they're certainly not going to be loyal users.

At the same time, Sun is continuing to spar with JBoss, the leading open-source J2EE company. JBoss has finally joined the JCP, but both Sun and JBoss may be more interested in continuing to fight over licensing and open-source issues than getting to work on bigger and better J2EE implementations.

Maybe the one common theme is that Sun seems to me to be wasting too much time with too many other issues. Perhaps the company's top executives should focus on leading the JCP to produce the best possible language and toolkits for developers, and ensuring that essential Java Specification Requests get pushed through the community process quickly.

Sun, it's time to get your act together. After all this time, the confusion about Java had been dying down. First, it was Java-the-language versus Java-the-JVM. Then it was J2EE versus J2SE. And now, you've stirred up the pot with Java-the-community-technology versus Java-the-Sun-products. Please, no more bad news and no more confusion. Is that too much to ask?

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