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Java Will Survive But Hold The Applause For The Rest Of Sun

Scott McNealy received a standing ovation at JavaOne in what was possibly his last appearance before the mammoth Java user group--last, that is, before Sun disappears inside Oracle once the $7.4 billion acquisition is complete. So why, if McNealy was such a celebrated leader, is his company being swallowed up?

"It's the economy, stupid," some might say. Or maybe, "He was too far ahead of his times." Personally, I don't think the clichés fit. Sun Microsystems was first and foremost a technology company that cut its teeth by outperforming rivals, including Digital Equipment, in the Unix workstation field. By taking workstation market share, Sun's first image of itself was that of the upstart, the disrupter.

As it grew, and McNealy cast Sun as the better Unix server choice than IBM or HP, adding a few barbs about "the good printer company" across the valley. I hope McNealy never draws Marc Hurd as his laser printer service man.

But it was when Sun produced Java in 1994 and crossed swords with Microsoft that McNealy's rhetoric found its full measure of expression. From 1995 on, McNealy sounded like Sun was Microsoft's biggest threat. In McNealy's vision of the future, Sun was about to swamp a malevolent Titanic without any assistance from the iceberg. It was of course all misplaced rhetoric.

Sun's real competitors were IBM and HP and a disruptive force sneaking up on Sun itself, called Linux. During the Dotcom boom, the anti-Microsoft words fit the temper of the times, and startups bought Sun hardware. When the inevitable downturn came, the absence of a long term business strategy became more evident.

Instead of being disrupted, IBM and HP took the lion's share of revenue out of the Unix market and began taking a larger share of revenue from the server market.

In the late 1990s, Sun had its finest hour when it defended Java from co-option by Microsoft. It prevented an altered version of Java from coming out that ran better on Windows than native Java. Such an eventuality would have split the developer community and bifurcated the language itself. Sun's defense preserved Java's integrity for computer users of generations to come. McNealy was at his best brandishing the righteous sword of Java's defense, while tweaking Microsoft's nose.

In this period, he was edgy and always good for a sound byte. Members of the press loved to quote him, but members of the press don't fill out orders for computers. And entertaining crowds is not the same thing as commanding troops in the field. Having a top ten list is no match for having a real business plan.

In the hard times, Sun couldn't seem to make up its mind which business it was in. Pressed for an answer, McNealy would say it was a "systems company," and since all the things it was doing contributed to its systems, it was justified in doing all things.

I always wanted to see Sun split off its software assets into a company distinct from the hardware core and let it run for the goal line. To some extent, McNealy turned too late to Jonathan Schwartz to play the software card when other options had already failed. Even so, Schwartz showed a clever eye for taking what was clearly a game nearly lost and turning it into a game nearly won.

The problem now is that Sun is still a systems company and Oracle is not.

After the industry veterans accept their applause and the checks are signed, Sun employees are going to find themselves inside a ferociously focused, enterprise applications company, one that brooks no nonsense about what's meant by "systems."

How they will fare will no longer be the concern of JavaOne attendees, who left town reassured that Oracle's interest in Java's continued existence matches their own. But the continuation of Java and life for the rest of Sun's initiatives after this acquisition is complete are likely to prove to be two radically different things.

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