INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Do you think it is wise for Sun to go to court over Java?
Answer
Yes. Microsoft has clearly attempted to define Java as a language and to implement it as a
language but not as a complete environment. Strategically, Sun very much wants Java to be
a complete computing environment, read that to mean an operating system. If Microsoft were
allowed by Sun to continue to relegate Java to language status only, that would hamper
Sunís ability to make it a broad, ubiquitous environment. By going to court, they are
going to get a resolution to that issue. They might win and they might lose, but it will
be resolved. And when itís resolved, the situation will be clearer. The risk associated
with going to court is a risk that Sun is willing to take. However, they have understood
that if they stayed out of court, the situation would remain unclear forever. We are not
attorneys and we do not know whether they will prevail in court. However, we do believe
that it will be a clear decision and that in the end it will be helpful for Sun.
Question 2
Some pour scorn on the idea that there will be any action to have the possibility of a
break up pushed forward. Do you agree with that?
Answer
We believe that the US Department of Justice will be aggressively pursuing Microsoft for
some time to come. They have made very clear indications that, win or lose with their
current skirmish over Microsoftís 1995 consent to agree with the US Department of
Justice, the US Department of Justice will more than likely continue and file more
lawsuits against Microsoft. They have used words recently that are very clear. They have
called Microsoft "an illegal monopoly" and those are very much fighting words.
They come from officials of the US Department of Justice, the Attorney General and the
assistant Attorney General. They are the position of the US government; itís very clear.
We believe that they are determined to go after Microsoft hard, and that they believe that
busting up that trust is important for US policy. So we disagree with Mr. McNealyís view
of that. He was making some comments about political influence, and frankly what we see
from the political people in Washington is quite the opposite. They seem aggressively
anti-Microsoft.
Question 3
And if they were anti-Microsoft, how would they break up the monopoly?
Answer
That is a value judgement that we are not ready to place on the issue. You would have to
put a certain set of conditions on a question like that to get us to respond. What I
donít want to do is give you any indications as to whether we believe Microsoft is an
illegal monopoly. Thatís a legal question that we canít answer. So thatís not the
issue. What we do is analyse what would happen if Microsoft won or if Microsoft lost. We
can analyse what a break-up of Microsoft would do to Microsoft and the industry. Iíve
read and seen hundreds of break-up scenarios, however, I have yet to see one that I felt
was workable, in the sense that it defined a new environment where the kind of competition
that the regulators want to stop would effectively be stopped. I can throw the question
back rhetorically: where does one draw the line between operating systems and
applications? What is an operating system, what is an application, and how would one break
that up? The question has come back to us on a number of occasions and we have examined a
number of scenarios. Yet we have not seen one scenario that we were certain would work. We
think we are fairly expert in our technical abilities. We also believe that the regulators
and the officials with the US Department of Justice and other governments around the world
are less expert in technology. Yet with all our expertise we donít see a really good
formula for doing such a thing. We would imagine that the kinds of revenues that would be
asked for by courts or by departments of justice and administrators of justice alike would
be very difficult. So weíre not saying that would be workable in a certain circumstance.
Microsoftís intention here, of course, is to drag this out as long and as hard as
possible. And it is our prediction and indication that, regardless of what suits or files
against Microsoft, that they will fight long and hard. Theyíll accept terms that donít
matter, such as their 1995 consent to agree which allowed them to continue to do their
practices as they wished. But they will not accept terms that they think or believe will
hurt their business. They would rather go to court over the long haul and believe that
they could prevail, especially in the circumstance where, as Mr. McNealy did point out,
there are political questions with respect to whether anti-trust laws in general apply to
the current technological world. They certainly apply to the industrial world early 20th
century. The question on the table is: do they apply to a post-industrial information
world, in the late 20th and 21st centuries? That question has to be
answered by politicians. So it could get very interesting and the point regarding whether
it moves out of the legal space into the political space is another thing that Microsoft
would hope to put forward, in essence taking a nationalistic policy within the US and
saying: Why would we want to break up a US company in that regard? They'll fight.
Question 4
Could you explain why Intel is important for Sun.
Answer
Intel and Sun are great competitors yet Sun has chosen to implement its operating system
Solaris on the Intel processor. We believe this to be a great quest of Sun's but one that
has been unrequited so far, one that will remain challenging for them. In the end we do
not believe that Intel is terribly important for Sun. We believe Sun can be successful
without a successful Intel product. Today Sun is very successful without a successful
Intel product. So you can look at that as all up-side, no down-side for Sun on Intel. They
might do better, they probably can't do worse, and technically it's not a huge investment
for Sun. They did win a contract from NCR some months ago and they might win more. We
consider those to be inconsequential for the industry at large, and expect the Intel world
to be fundamentally dominated by Microsoft and Windows NT, not Sun Solaris. The market
share for Sun Solaris on Intel will most likely be imperceptible in a few years.
Question 5
Do you agree with the statement that Microsoft is not a necessary distribution channel for
Java on Windows, and do you think that a possible decision for Microsoft might be to walk
away from Java and if so, how would that play out for Java?
Answer
We believe that most users have been sceptical about Microsoft's support of Java up to
this point and have not been committing themselves to the Microsoft implementation of Java
for mission-critical applications or for other kinds of applications. And those users who
want to exploit Java will be able to exploit Java on all of their platforms, with or
without Microsoft's help. Those who want to write Windows applications will be able to
write Windows applications, regardless. Now, we suggest to them if they're going to write
a Windows application that they not use Java as the language to write Windows
applications. Visual Basic comes to mind, C++ , those are good languages to write a
Windows application. Not necessarily Microsoft's Java tools. But in the end Microsoft did
jump on the Java bandwagon because their browser share was zero or close to it, and they
felt that they had to make a move to gain browser share. They have made a lot of other
moves since then to gain browser share. We do not believe that their browser share would
be diminished considerably if they did not have good Java support in it. So the scenario
that McNealy is putting forward is reasonable, but for the contractual commitments. They
have a contractual commitment. It's in court right now. What McNealy is saying is that he
wants to hold them to it. They signed a document which was made public that appears to
require them to support Java in some formal venture. That will be decided by litigation.
Question 6
Let's go back to mission-critical applications in Java. What does Sun need to do to get
the industry to have faith in Java?
Answer
Making Java more capable for mission-critical applications will take time, energy and the
work of individuals who have experience in that arena. We do not believe that there is a
technical hurdle that will keep Java from becoming capable of doing those kinds of tasks.
It's a lot of work, a lot of writing of code, testing, making mistakes, correcting
mistakes, and moving forward. Organisations who want to be early adopters will be
assisting the market in moving forward. Most organisations will wait for the technology to
be more proven before they put it into production. I am referring to the more classical
companies which make up a large portion of the market. There's nothing different with this
phenomena or this technology direction than all the others we have seen in the past.
Sometimes adoption cycles take longer because technologies do not mature because they have
some fundamental flaw. We do not believe that Java is fundamentally flawed. We believe
that the one issue that's consistently raised with respect to interpretation versus
compilation is a performance penalty but not a flaw necessarily. And that that can be
overcome.
Question 7
McNealy said that he wants Sun to continue to match the pricing NT service.
Answer
The comments that we were making were not with respect to competition with NT servers,
they were with respect to competition with other large UNIX servers. When it comes to
competition with NT servers, firstly, we do not believe they are price competitive with
Compaq ProLiant 6000s, although they are closer than they have been. But secondly and more
importantly, we have yet to meet the customer who was planning to put NT on a Compaq, who
looked at the new Sun devices and decided to put in a UNIX system and run it on a Spark.
It's not a likely buying decision change that people would make, especially at the
departmental PC server workgroup level. So the net effect of the new class of server at
the low end is that people who were buying UNIX servers for UNIX-type applications are now
getting them less expensively, and for that they're very thankful. But we don't see Sun
getting back any business from Microsoft and Intel in that regard, nor do we expect them
to. We expect them to be extraordinarily competitive on the high end of the server
business, but continuing to lose market share at the low end where Windows NT and Intel
are doing so well.
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