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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
None of this is a sure thing. Java, despite the initial enthusiasm, will still be a tough sell. It runs slower than conventional languages, and the software libraries that streamline a programmer's task are still being written for Java. But Java offers would-be software moguls something no other programming environment can: a way to completely bypass the software-industry middlemen. "These wonderfully brilliant Marc Andreessens will stay up all night eating Twinkies, drinking Jolt and writing in Java," predicts Sun's McNealy. "Then they'll put something out on the Web, and boom!--word of mouth!" The trick...