One Step Forward, One Step Back
By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
November 1, 2003 —
(Page 1 of 2)
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.
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