15_Jan

15 January 1999

I'm at the Brussels Airport today, waiting for a flight that's been delayed some four hours. It's been a short but grueling trip to Europe and it's not quite over yet. There's a huge storm approaching Western Europe, at least that's what CNN had to say in the Sabena Business Class lounge just now. Hopefully we'll get lucky and the flight will take off well before the storm hits. I should know in four hours.
January is now half gone. This year will pass quickly enough and before long it will be 2000, Y2K fears notwithstanding. There is so much uncertainty around Y2K. In a year, we'll all have a lot better idea. Somewhere between the Apocalypse and business-as-usual, the Y2K bug will take its toll and soon enough, we'll know. In the mean time, prudent preparations should be made by each of us. Personally, I'm preparing as though a hurricane was going to hit Manhattan on the precise day of the change, although it's not likely be that dramatic a day at all. I've read that only 8% of the systems that are going to fail will fail on Jan. 1, 2000. Over the next three years or so, the Y2K bugs will bite if they're going to. It's likely that Y2K won't be so much of a bang, but more of a whimper.
I've been evangelizing Jini this trip; a meeting in London with some Sun sales folks and a very large Sun customer. Then the AB Software annual conference in Brussels. AB Software is one of Sun's largest resellers in Belgium. The conference was held in a small castle on the outskirts of Brussels. It was a small crowd -- a little over a hundred people in attendance, representing all aspects of our industry: engineering, support, marketing, sales and management. The country manager for Sun was there along with a few other local Sun folks. It was the choir, really -- preaching to the choir. Adding some perspective and perhaps a little motivation to a group of people that were, for the most part, Sun/Java believers. There was one fellow there who confessed to being a M$ bigot. So I made sure I was as factual as I could be. It's not culturally kosher to directly knock the competition in Europe in any event -- so I behaved as best as I could, using parables and analogies. Some facts remain, however, regardless of how you slice it.
Bill Gates started M$ with a product he purchased and then licensed to IBM. That product was QDOS -- quick and dirty operating system. And that's exactly what it was. The true innovation by Gates wasn't the operating system at all -- nor has it ever been. It was the licensing model. From that early beginning, M$ was launched, and the rest, as they say, is history.
But with beginnings comes a legacy. We have computer viruses today precisely because Mr. Gates licensed QDOS -- an operating system that was never meant to be networked. It was intended to provide a simply, stand alone personal computer OS, the leanest of platforms for games and basic applications. That's it. Simple and easy. That's all it was. And the legacy of that beginning remains, haunting each and every desktop that runs Windows today. Indeed, even NT, which was supposed to lose that legacy, has inherited much of the early weaknesses. Why? Because NT needed to run the very same applications that made M$ a household name. That was and is the legacy of Micro$oft. And networking M$ systems has been and will be a problem for years to come, precisely because of that beginning.
When I talk about Jini, I get excited. Jini builds on the Java Virtual Machine, giving rise to a federation of Java systems. Spontaneous networking, self healing networks, super computer capabilities gleaned dynamically from a network of small systems -- all this and more is possible with a simple set of protocols built on the JVM. It's simple but elegant, and hence betrays a certain beauty of design that is inherent within. Jini fulfills the promise and the vision that was Sun's beginning: the network is the computer. And in this brave new world that is emerging, one that is rapidly wiring itself, one that is network within network within network, elegant design is the very thing that will deliver the best for all of us. M$ has been very successful at building a business -- one of historical proportions. But given their legacy and the importance of internet technologies to the emerging world, M$ is probably the poorest choice to move ahead in the new internetworked world. In the opinion of this evangelist, Micro$oft is a company of the 20th century. The internet is technology for the 21st. And like other great successes before it, Micro$oft too will stumble and eventually wither away, too bloated by its own success and hubris to realize that it was the value of the network all along.

Footnote: After a four hour wait, I finally caught an air ship to JFK, landing late Friday night.