Sun Pours Java All Over Bill

By Chris Taylor

In the heart of Silicon Valley last Tuesday, a lone district court judge did something the entire antitrust division of the U.S. Justice Department can still only dream about: he forced Bill Gates to change one of his key business practices.

Java, the universal programming language owned by Sun Microsystems, has long been Microsoft's biggest bugaboo. Gates said in a private e-mail that its potential to make Microsoft obsolete "scares the hell out of me." If Java should capture the hearts and minds of programmers, computers could one day run without the need for an expensive operating system like Windows. To head off that threat, Microsoft licensed Java from Sun in 1995 and used it to create its own "polluted"--or incompatible--version, which discouraged software developers from using the original Sun program. Sun cried breach of contract, and a lawsuit followed. Now Judge Ronald Whyte has handed Redmond a February deadline to stop shipping Java technology--currently included in Windows 98, Internet Explorer and even the humble Microsoft Office suite--without first getting Sun's seal of approval.

The stunning victory gave executives at Sun's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., a chance to be magnanimous. "We'd be more than happy to help Microsoft become compatible," offered Sun vice president Alan Baratz. While the ruling was only a preliminary injunction (a trial date hasn't even been set yet), you can forgive Sun for acting like giant killers. Whyte is a tech-savvy judge with a reputation for weighty, watertight decisions. Sun's case, he wrote, is likely to succeed on merit.

A less combative company than Microsoft would probably balk at such odds and settle. Microsoft has vowed to fight on. But at the very least, Scott McNealy--the flamboyant Sun CEO who loves to play David to Gates' Goliath--has finally got a good slingshot in. And that's just what Java developers were waiting for, according to Michael Sick, a member of Java Lobby, a loose collection of developers. "We always knew Microsoft did not have Java's best interests in mind. They're not being a team player because they don't own the team."

So is this the way Redmond's market dominance ends--not with an antitrust bang but a contractually negligent whimper? Such an outcome would be favorable to the start-ups of Silicon Valley, where the specter of federal regulation is just as terrible as that of Microsoft. "This is more important than the antitrust case," says Mark Radcliffe, a Palo Alto, Calif., attorney for tech firms. "People are looking for something that doesn't have the taint of government intrusion, and this plays on their desire to let technology solve the problem."

In other words, Java could cause Microsoft to end up looking a lot like IBM in the '80s--beleaguered by years of antitrust action but usurped only when a new revolution in computing took hold. The rise of the personal computer cost Big Blue its overwhelming dominance. Will Java do the same to Big Bill? The jury's still out on that one, although the release of Java 1.2 this week might help silence some critics of Java software. "We've never had this level of confidence in code," says Sick. "It's not where it needs to be yet, but it's getting there faster than anything has before." And if Microsoft opts to join the Java team with pure intentions, success could come more speedily than ever.

--By Chris Taylor