Java geek hits the Jackpot
Published: 29 Jan 2004 15:05 GMT
How important are tools at Sun? Do you make a lot of money on tools, or is it more just sort of a kind of an entry point into more encompassing sales?
When you look at computer systems, they have this sort of yin-and-yang aspect. They have hardware and software, and neither works without the other. So when you look at the hardware side of Sun, it is absolutely crucial to them that there be a very large and vibrant market here in software that runs on the hardware. Probably the most important item on the charter for the tools group at Sun is to do whatever it takes to make the world of Java development easier and more attractive and more economically vibrant to encourage the existence of more and more interesting software. That drives demand.
The IBM-backed open-source tools project, Eclipse, has gotten a lot of momentum in the past 18 months and, of course, Microsoft is known for how productive its tools are. Do you see those two platforms as your primary competition?
Well, I think of them as competition in very different ways. You know, Eclipse is one of those things that, depending on which hat I am wearing, I either sort of love it or hate it. Wearing my Java community hat, I love it. Wearing my chief technology officer of tools hat -- sort of a Scott McNealy way of putting it -- I don't as much. It's sort of like a hockey league. Hockey is really boring in a league that has only got one team, right? So, while on the one hand, you know we are really committed to having a healthy league, because without a league, we don't have a game. On the other hand, we want to get up there and win the next game.
The competition with Microsoft has sort of a different flavour to it. It is much more of a life-and-death kind of struggle.
Why do you call it a life-and-death kind of struggle?
Well, because if they succeed, the whole ecosystem that the rest of the industry feeds off goes away.
How so?
Well, the Microsoft view of the universe is that there should be no interoperability at all. Period. Or, if there is interoperability, it is between different versions of Windows, and we are very much in the biodiversity camp.
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