A Contrast in Styles

by John Boyd

McNealy is a contradictory and driven soul. His inner conflicts play out through his personal hardware and software. Still in his early 40s, he plods the lecture stage with the rounded posture of a man twice his age, and an ego and charisma powerful enough to inflate the Tokyo Dome.

As he spun his Java vision in front of a large Tokyo gathering of industry folk, he peppered his talk with anti-Microsoft and PC put-downs that ranged from the funny to the caustic. "You use computers all day long," McNealy observed. "Your camera has computer chips in it. A new automobile has 20 microprocessors in it. ATMs, kiosks, cell phones.... The only computer you don't know how to use is your Microsoft computer.

"It's as if he believes he can talk down Microsoft and the PC, causing them to shrivel and disappear, thus paving the way for the ascendancy of the network computer (NC) - or JavaStation, as Sun calls its NC version. Ironically, McNealy's words merely provoke a passion among Microsofties to compete even harder to ensure the future remains PC.

McNealy's contrary attitude is inexplicable, given that he's witnessed Microsoft's responses over the years to competing technologies such as Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, the Macintosh, Unix, and more recently the Internet and Netscape's Navigator browser. Nevertheless, virtually since the inception of Java and the NC, he has talked them up as Windows smashers.

Why on earth alert a paranoid opponent to your real intentions, when in this industry every week that goes by without a competitive response strengthens your chances of success? The answer can only be that McNealy is so emotionally driven to defeating Microsoft that common sense has no chance of prevailing.

All of which prompted me to naively query him, after his Java lecture, if he was really taking Microsoft seriously enough. He responded with emotive incredulity. Had I really listened to what he'd said for the previous hour? If I had, he said, then I'd have known that he "couldn't have taken Microsoft more seriously.

"In my quaking defense to his onslaught, I brought up the matter of his Microsoft put-downs and the huge success of Windows NT in recent months - especially the gains being made in the enterprise, which has long been Sun's domain. He obligingly illustrated my point perfectly by proclaiming, "NT is a disaster!"

But if it is such a disaster, I persisted, why is a great engineering company like HP backing NT?

"HP is longer a computer manufacturer. It's a vendor," retorted McNealy. His reasoning here is that HP has let SCO Corp. take over the writing of HP's next version of Unix, while Intel has effectively taken over the design of the next-generation 64-bit microprocessor that HP and Intel are jointly working on.

Hesitantly persisting, I queried that if NT is so bad, how come it's now getting all the volume? "Volume doesn't mean it's good," came the rejoinder.

My response of, "But volume is the market!" was dismissed by, "If you want volume, Java has volume." Then he turned to those listening nearby and said, "He thinks I'm crazy." This was the first thing we could agree on.

Lew Platt couldn't be more opposite. Quietly confident and unassuming, he had to strive to make a case to me that Hewlett-Packard hasn't lost out on the Internet. Like Sun, HP is also a long-standing Unix vendor. But rather than disparage the competing NT, HP has heartily embraced it.

"At HP, we have decided not to participate in any Holy Wars about operating systems," said Platt. "We remain committed to Unix. We're also excited about NT and its value proposition.

"Then, in a gentle dig at Sun, he added, "Some of our smaller competitors are saying HP can't execute a strategy providing industry-leading platforms for both Unix and NT. I think that statement is really a function of their smaller size. After all, if HP were just an $8 billion company like Sun, or even a $17 billion company like Compaq, we might be less ambitious. But we're a $32 billion computer company, and we can and will successfully execute a strategy based on two operating systems.

"So there you have it. HP, the careful engineering company guided by market realities. Sun, the brash maverick marketeer betting its future on Java and risking losing rather than help market Windows NT.

Yes, HP may be bigger and safer, but it is Sun, with its provocative ideas and stance, that is setting the industry alight. And if the industry is to remain exciting and innovative, Sun had better carry on shining.

After mingling with the captains of industry, John Boyd then writes about his experiences for a number of publications, including the weekly Computer Corner column in the Japan Times and various CMP publications. If you want the secondhand experience of sharing in the glory, try risking fail mail to contact him at 6840615@mcimail.com.

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