pany will disagree with Sun, take its bat and ball, and go home. That's true even if Sun maintains its relatively high-minded approach. So, ultimately, the Java community needs its own way of resolving disputes.
BYTE set out to systematically discover what the first wave of Java evaluators thinks about the technology. You can read the full results in the Bits article "Survey Reveals Java Adoption Plans". Nearly 300 people gave us their opinions about a wide range of issues, and we learned a lot about what these hardy pioneers think.
Judging from the survey, dreams of total control by one software company are foolish, at least for the late 1990s. Get over it, Bill. And you, too, Scott, Larry, and whoever else suffers from this malady.
The Java pioneers who answered our survey are among the best and brightest in computing. They must like what Sun has done -- they overwhelmingly consider Java open -- yet they want the tec
hnology turned over to a standards body. Here's a surprise: Two-thirds are doing their Java development principally on Windows NT, and they're going for multiplatform deployment. How can that be? The truth is that no one vendor has a solution for modern, large-scale computing.
Microsoft, for example, has a lot to prove about scale and scope before it can substitute for Unix across the board -- it has its plate full just keeping Windows 95/98 from imploding under its own weight. Unix/Linux on the desktop, outside of technical computing, is not a solution for many people. Commercial Unixes are still much pricier than NT for servers, although for many they're a better value. Yet increasing numbers of NT server applications are driving down the cost of deployment. Java, in terms of reliability and applications support, is where Windows was 10 years ago. Yesterday's contenders -- the Mac and OS/2 -- are still serviceable, but are they a more broad-based platform than Windows?
Messy, isn't it? Diversit
y is the name of the game. Making diversity easier -- not limiting it -- should be the goal of all serious players for the foreseeable future.
That's why I'm glad that Sequent and Digital Equipment are cooperating to build a 64-bit Unix for Merced. It's worth pointing out that Sequent did more to get symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) up and running on the Intel platform than either Intel or Microsoft. Add to that Digital's background in 64-bit Unix on Alpha and in clustering, and you have a lot of know-how. They deserve Intel's support. In a strange way, they also deserve Microsoft's support; if you're buying a big SMP server to run 64-bit Unix, it's nice to know that it could also run 64-bit NT when that becomes available. That's a much better scenario than choosing between NT on a bitty box and Unix on a monster box.
Digital's alliances with Sequent and Intel suggest that the folks in Maynard have figured out that Digital is a computer company, not an Alpha company. Microsoft, which used to be exe
mplary in understanding it was a software company, seems to have regressed to a Windows company. Remember when IBM was an MVS-SNA-OS/2-PS/2 company? That was just before billions of dollars of red ink flooded Armonk. If it could happen to IBM, it could happen to anyone.
BYTE readers have spoken. Ultimately, I expect you'll hold the industry's feet to the fire: Make life in a mixed environment easier, or hit the road. And don't say we didn't warn you.
Mark Schlack, Editor in Chief,
mschlack@bix.com
Uncommon Sense
