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It was a masterly stroke, allowing Microsoft to wrap itself in Java's aura while at the same time puncture Netscape's over-inflated stock balloon. The market reacted strongly. Sun's stock price jumped sharply; Netscape's fell more than $28, or 18%, in one day.
Netscape's Andreessen took Microsoft's entry as a challenge. "When there's battle between a bear and an alligator," he says, "what determines the victor is the terrain. Microsoft just moved into our terrain." Microsoft shrugs off such talk as bravado. "Java support is like a belly button," says Roger Heinen, vice president of Microsoft's software-developer division. "Everybody's going to have it."
Making belly buttons was not what James Gosling had in mind in 1990, when he started work on the language he called Oak (after the tree outside his office window). The veteran programmer wanted to get the microprocessors inside consumer appliances (TVs, VCRs, car alarms) to talk to one another--a programming challenge that required writing software code that was not only highly compressed but also virtually idiot-proof. Most consumers, unlike most computer owners, don't expect their toaster ovens to "crash."
As Oak, or rather Java, went through its many revisions, some principles didn't change. It was to be a thoroughly modern programming language, embodying all the major advances in computer theory of the past quarter-century. It had to be "object-oriented," forcing programmers to write in small, self-contained units that could be slotted into one another like Lego blocks. It had to be robust, which is to say crash-proof, doing without many standard programming tools that give developers flexibility but can lead to unpredictable results. Finally, it had to be secure, even in the hostile hacker- and virus-filled environment of the Internet. Before Java allows any line of code to be executed, it determines whether the command is a legal one, using powerful encryption to ensure that the program hasn't been tampered with.
For all its strengths, Java might have gone unnoticed--as half a dozen equally modern languages have--were it not for the novel way Sun released it. Having seen Netscape capture 70% of the market for Web browsers by giving its software away, Sun decided to use the same, "profitless" approach, issuing one low-key press release and letting word of mouth on the Internet do the rest. It was a familiar ploy for Sun's Joy, who helped foster the growth of the Internet itself in the early 1980s by shipping free Internet Protocol software with every Sun computer. Says he: "We knew that if we put Java on the net, it would find the leaks and flow everywhere."
Of course Sun fully expects its profitless approach to turn a profit in the end. More than half the computer servers on the Internet are Sun machines; anything that increases Internet traffic (as Java surely will) is bound to add to Sun's bottom line. Even more interesting, from a business perspective, is the so-called intranet--the collection of networks that connect computers withincorporations--that both Sun and Microsoft have targeted as a rich area for growth. To help head off its chief competitor, Sun last week launched a new JavaSoft division, run by Alan Baratz, a former IBM executive and president of Rupert Murdoch's Delphi Internet Services Corp., to boost Java in both the fast-growing Internet and the far more profitable intranet.