The creation of the Java Fund and testimony from companies like Marimba bode well for Java, but will smaller software companies profit from the technology?
Las Vegas (November 22, 1996) — Java may be funneling cash into Sun Microsystems, but panelists at Comdex yesterday (Nov. 21), had mixed opinions concerning how smaller software developers will profit from the technology — or even whether the platform is viable.
“The Internet is not reliable, not manageable, and not scalable,” said Robert Tasker, senior vice president of computing research and consulting for the Yankee Group, in Boston. Java-based applications, which use the Internet as their underlying distribution platform, aren’t reliable enough to support business applications, he said.
Developers will be hard-pressed to sell Java applets to corporations until the questions of bandwidth, testing, and management are sorted out, Tasker said. “I’m not clear how these developers will make money, aside from Microsoft and Sun,” Tasker said.
On the other hand, venture capitalists are betting on Java, which proves that there is a viable business opportunity, said Sun Java Evangelist Miko Matsumura.
Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers, a venture capital firm focused on technology companies and based in Menlo Park, CA, set up a 00 million “Java Fund” in August to fuel Java development in startup companies. The fund has financial backing from Cisco, Compaq, IBM, Netscape, Oracle, and Tele-Communications Inc. (For JavaWorld‘s article on the Java Fund, see
http://www.javaworld.com/jw-08-1996/jw-08-javafund.html.)
One of the companies to benefit from this fund is Marimba, of Palo Alto, CA, which develops technologies to deploy full-scale Java applications, such as word processors and workflow environments, over the Internet.
“Applets are just a small, baby step on the way to the Java dream,” said Kim Polese, founder of Marimba.
Java interpreters and just-in-time compilers are getting faster and better all the time, Polese said. Once Java applications can be deployed more efficiently, companies will consider buying Java applications in lieu of C++-based ones, she added. In addition, Java applets will be able to run in operating systems and not just on browsers — making them much more like traditional office applications, she said.
“Java was not meant to live out its life in a browser, it was just launched within one,” Polese said.
“Java applets will completely dominate the market and replace C++ in two years time,” Matsumura predicted. However, these Java-based applications won’t mirror C++-based ones.
Rather, Java-based applications will take advantage of the Java language and its cross-platform flexibility, such as a word processor that can double as an automatic HTML publisher or collaborative whiteboard, Matsumura said. In addition, users can download what they need, but don’t have to take up space on their hard drives with unwanted features, “such as a Swahili font in a word processor,” he said.
But whether Java applications will catch on comes down to how users and corporate IT managers view them, rather than how developers do, Tasker said.
“As an IS manager, I would care most about how much money, time, and headache Java can save the company. As a user, I care only about ease of use,” Tasker said. “Never buy version 1.0 of anything,” he said.
Users attending the panel had mixed views of Java.
Georgia Lazana, an IS manager who works for an Athens, Greece-based pharmaceutical company, Janssen-Cilag, said that Java-based applications could “vastly reduce distribution problems to geographically dispersed offices.” However, she was hesitant to accept Java as a viable programming language right now. “It will be two years before Java reaches the sophistication of C++ and Visual Basic,” Lazana said.
Another user was more optimistic of Java in its current incarnation. “I would tell anyone who is learning a programming language for the first time to start with Java,” said Greg Houlette, a software engineer for Quantum, a Milpitas-CA storage technology company.
