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The key to Java is the way it will run with equal ease on a variety of computer operating systems: Microsoft's Windows 95, Apple's Macintosh and various flavors of Unix. Java carves out what Sun calls a "virtual Java machine" within the software of each of these computer systems, thus getting around an irksome problem that has bedeviled programmers and users since the dawn of the computer age: incompatibility. Incompatibility is the reason that a program written for, say, a Windows machine won't run on a Mac, and vice versa. "Java really levels the playing field," says Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun. "You write a program once, and it will run anywhere, on anything." This, he adds pointedly, could make life very difficult for certain "large applications companies."
Nobody in the computer industry--or on Wall Street--needs to be told what large application company McNealy has in mind. Microsoft, as the world's biggest maker of software for personal computers, has the most to lose should a new, non-Microsoft programming language take hold. Microsoft not only owns the operating system that runs 8 out of 10 desktop computers, but it dominates the market for most other software as well, from application programs (word processors, spreadsheets, encyclopedias) to programming languages to a wide variety of programming tools. All this would be undermined should Java catch on. "Java," Microsoft chairman Bill Gates told a gathering of businesswomen last month, "is there to overthrow what we've done."
That would not necessarily be a bad thing in the minds of many programmers, who are always on the lookout for what they call a "new platform" on which to write new, hot-selling software. The virtual Java machine represents, as Sun co-founder Bill Joy puts it, "the lightest-weight platform we've ever had"--made not of metal, plastic and silicon but of a few thousand lines of code.
Programmers who find the market for Windows software increasingly crowded and unprofitable see fresh opportunities to make their mark in Java. "The geeks are buzzed," says Dave Winer, a Silicon Valley-based programmer and self-described geek. "It's like a whole world just opened up to us."
The enthusiasm of people like Winer is important. The millions Microsoft spent last summer promoting Windows 95 was directed as much to the software developers as to the public. Since no single company, not even Microsoft, can write all the software that is needed to make a new machine a success, competing computer makers are locked in a perpetual battle for the hearts and minds of the programming community. One of the fiercest skirmishes in recent months has been over the market for so-called Web browsers, in which Microsoft, Netscape and Sun all compete.
That battle came to a head the first week in December, when Sun and Microsoft staged competing press conferences. Sun went first, announcing a long list of companies that had agreed to endorse Java, including IBM, Apple, DEC, Adobe, Silicon Graphics, Hewlett Packard, Oracle and Toshiba. Everybody expected Microsoft to strike back, reaffirming its commitment to its own Java-like Visual Basic. But at the last minute, Gates changed his mind, announcing that he too would license Java, while also promising somewhat menacingly to "extend" it.