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the Software View: Java's eleven most influential people
Welcome back, gentle reader. On Thursday, September 24, 1998, eBay Incorporated, an online auctioneer that sells everything from Beanie Babies to computers, went public at $18 per share. When trading officially began, eBay shares zoomed up to 53-1/2 before retreating to close at 47-3/8, up 29-3/8 or 163 percent. Based on 3.5 million shares and the $18 offering price, the San Jose, California based company will raise $63 million and have a market capitalization of $1.88 billion. That means that eBay scored the fifth-highest first-day gain in the market's history. It does not hurt that eBay already is the fifth most-popular site on the Web, with its total monthly usage minutes and total impressions ranking behind only Yahoo!, Microsoft, Excite and Netscape, according to Media Metrix. Users spend more time in eBay than they do on either the Disney or America Online Web sites. The IPO earned eBay's chairman and founder, Pierre Omidyar, $274.1 million.
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Now, dear readers, on with this week's episode of the Software View!
In this issue, I will discuss and reveal the eleven people with the most influence over the future direction of Sun Microsystems' JavaTM software technology platform.
Dr. Alan Baratz is the President, Java Software for Sun Microsystems, Incorporated. Dr. Alan Baratz is in charge of developing, marketing, and supporting the Java software platform and associated software products to customers worldwide. He oversees Sun's efforts to continue enhancing the Java platform in close partnership with other major information technology and software companies, setting a new standard for open, industry participative software design and development. Before Sun, Dr. Baratz was President and Chief Executive Officer of Delphi, the online business unit of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Prior to joining Delphi, Dr. Baratz held a number of senior management positions throughout nearly fourteen years with IBM in New York, culminating in his being named the company's director of strategic development. Dr. Baratz holds both a master's degree and a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of California at Los Angeles. Alan Baratz came under heavy fire from Microsoft lawyers in early September during the second day of hearings in Sun's Java lawsuit against the software giant. In almost an hour of pointed cross-examination, Microsoft lawyers grilled Baratz on his negotiations with Microsoft executives over the final wording of a Java licensing contract that Microsoft signed with Sun in March 1996. Microsoft attorney David McDonald grilled Baratz about his inconsistent memory. With each accusation, Baratz shifted in the witness box, glanced at the judge and answered very carefully. "That was not one of the most pleasant experiences I've ever been through," Baratz said afterwards, standing outside the courtroom at the San Jose District Court. In the next year, the president of Sun Microsystems' Java Software division must maneuver cautiously between paranoid partners, standards committees and, of course, Microsoft. While doing all this, he must also cope with technology upgrades if his company is to turn Java's popularity into a real business.
Jonathan Schwartz is the Director of Product Marketing at Sun's Java Software division. Schwartz is the former Chief Executive Officer of Lighthouse Design Limited, a San Mateo, California company which was acquired by Sun in July, 1996 and is a business unit of Sun Labs. This unit is the supplier of Enterprise Development Technologies and core components necessary for large businesses to initiate and expedite 100% Pure Java computing projects. Lighthouse's JavaPlan family of products runs on diverse platforms including Sun's Solaris, Windows NT, OpenStep and Java. Schwartz is also a member of The McKinsey Institute. Sun shareholders and executives want a bigger payoff than the licensing fees Sun receives from developers. That means selling its own applications written in Java, as well as offering software that will drive sales of Sun's bread-and-butter business – computers that run Internet services and corporate networks. This means that turning Java into commercial software has become a top priority for Sun. The trouble is Schwartz will be competing with Sun's Java licensees while playing custodian of the Java standard and steward of the Java platform. Schwartz promised licensees this April that Sun would separate church (platform) and state (applications) and would build products that complemented rather than competed with other Java licensees. He is still covering both sides of the fence. "My job is to go out there and build a business for Sun," he said last week, but he also insisted that "our work with partners is more important than any specific (Sun) product." Sun's recent purchase of NetDynamics, a hot start-up in the key application server space, signals otherwise. It is a direct challenge to partners with competing products, including Netscape, IBM, Oracle, WebLogic, and Progress Software. Insiders label Schwartz as very smart and ambitious. Sun is in a tricky position and faces tough questions about Java from both its partners and its competitors. The acquisition of NetDynamics underscores just how badly Sun wants to jump-start its independent enterprise software business and glean revenue from its massive investment in Java technology. Here are the companies that Sun either is looking at or has already bought, and the Java technologies that Sun receives from each acquisition. i-Planet: remote Java access for Sun.net. NetDynamics: Java application server, middleware, and tools. Lighthouse Design Limited: Java productivity applications and tools. Longview Technologies: developer of Sun's HotSpot dynamic Java compilation technology. Sarrus: calendaring and Java scheduling technology. Chorus: embedded Java real-time operating system vendor. Diba: Java Set-top box and device manufacturer. Integrity Arts: Java smart card technology company.
William N. Joy is the co-founder, Chief Scientist, and a member of the Executive Committee for Sun Microsystems, Incorporated. The many achievements of Joy are legendary, and any one would garner Joy a bust in the Unix Hacker Hall of Fame. In 1975, Joy was a Ph.D. student at the University of California at Berkeley. Captivated by Unix, but unhappy with the ed line editor, he took the code for the em ("editor for mortals") editor (supplied by developer George Coulouris) and in a week produced most of the ex editor. In 1976, Joy wrote an improved Pascal compiler for Unix that became a standard Pascal programming tool. In 1978, he designed and produced the first BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) of Unix utilities (which became the standard in education and research and was notable for introducing virtual memory and internetworking using TCP/IP to Unix, whose networking protocols and implementations helped spawn the Internet) and began distributing BSD on tape. That same year, he created the vi editor and distributed the 2BSD (Second Berkeley Software Distribution). The 3BSD was a complete bootable system. In the early 1980's, Joy took the nascent TCP/IP and in a few weeks was running it satisfactorily between test machines. In one night, he wrote the utilities rcp, rlogin, and rsh for temporary use: They are still going strong today. Joy also created the C shell for BSD, and it was subsequently adopted in AT&T's own Unix System V release 4.0. No one person has done for Unix what Joy has. He co-designed the Sun SPARC microprocessor architecture, and developed the Network File System (NFS), which allows multi-vendor remote access. In the 1980's he spearheaded Sun's evangelism of the "open systems" model of computing which allows different groups to contribute design by making the specifications of its components freely available. Joy holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He holds a Lifetime Achievement Award from the USENIX Association and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. In 1997, Joy was appointed as Co-Chairman of the Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee. Throughout Java's brief span of life, Joy remains a constant. He is its progenitor, champion, its inspiration, its muse, and its guiding spirit. In the early 1990's, Joy started an advanced research and development team for Sun Microsystems called Aspen Smallworks in Aspen, Colorado. From that team, Java sprang to life. He negotiated Sun's contract with Netscape for Java, drove the technical team that specified Java applets and the release 1.0 version of the Java programming language. Joy wrote large swathes of the Java Language Specification to ensure that Java was not only safe, but also appropriate. He spearheaded Sun's recently released Jini technology project, and, recently, was named a director at Novell. What does the future hold for Joy? Well, he has worked on JavaSpaces, a technology which enables transactions and transactive communication. And he is working on objects and Java agent technology.
Scott G. McNealy is the Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer, and President of Sun Microsystems, Incorporated. He achieved a B.S. in Economics from Harvard and an M.B.A. from Stanford. McNealy helped to found Sun in 1982. As an opinion maker, McNealy is well known for his wisecracks, his controversial views, and under his leadership Sun has maintained its offbeat edge. He likes it to be known that he is probably the "longest running and most belligerently consistent" spokesperson for freedom of choice for computer users through open systems. Some "Scottisms" give you a feel for the man: On survival in the industry: "Have lunch or be lunch." On Sun's culture: "Kick butt and have fun." On the competition: "Big hat, no cattle." On keeping a low profile: "I want Sun to be controversial. If everyone believes in your strategy, you have zero chance of profit." McNealy is brash and outspoken. He is not a subtle man. The athletic, six-foot-something, jeans-and-T-shirt, trash-talking Chief Executive Officer believes in working hard, playing hard, and never pulling a punch. If you want to understand McNealy, look at the company he has nourished for 16 years. In its early days, the atmosphere at Sun was more like a hyperactive fraternity house than a business. McNealy is infamous for his high technology Top Ten lists and his Bill Gates bashing. He is complex, smart, and fiercely ambitious. That fateful day in 1994 when McNealy was shown the Java project, he saw it as much more, as a destination for the whole company, and even for the whole industry to pursue. It was like a switch went on. The moment he could map it to his problem - namely, how to harness the Internet to stop Microsoft from swallowing us all - he became its biggest supporter. He also supported the insightful and wise decision to allow individuals and developers to download the Java Development Kit for free. His fingerprints are all over Sun's Jini technology open source licensing agreement. It was McNealy's idea that Sun pitch Java to Microsoft. He is famous for his Microsoft snubs. His barbs are outlandish and rude, but they get Sun noticed. Says Tom Henkel, a server analyst at the Gartner Group in Stamford, Conn.: "With his Gates bashing, McNealy has single-handedly - or single-mouthedly - raised Sun's visibility." What is he working on now? Well, he is trying to sell more Sun hardware and software applications to Internet Service Providers. The recently released Sun Internet Mail Server 3.5 is trying to staunch the flow of Exchange servers. And, of course, Java, Java, Java!
The creator of a software technology platform always retains influence over it. James Gosling is a Sun Fellow and Vice President of the Java Software Division for Sun Microsystems, Incorporated. He is the lead engineer and key architect behind Sun Microsystems' revolutionary Java programming language and software technology platform. Gosling has been involved in distributed computing since his arrival at Sun in 1984. His first project was the NeWSTM window system. Before joining Sun, he built a multiprocessor version of UNIX; the original Andrew window system and toolkit; and several compilers and mail systems. He also built the original UNIX 'Emacs', and helped build a satellite data acquisition system. George Gilder writes about the "redoubtable Sun engineer James Gosling. Called by John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins "perhaps the world's greatest living programmer," Gosling is a bearded man with shaggy blondish hair. He displays a subtly wounded look that is possibly the effect of a career that, to that point, had consisted mostly of brilliant failures. Like many technology projects that seem to spring full-blown from the brow of a genius, Java is in fact the fruit of a near-lifelong quest. Gosling's career began at age 14 in Calgary when, during a high school tour, he memorized the code to the locks on the doors of the computer center at the University of Calgary. He then regularly admitted himself to read computer texts and use DEC PDP-8s. He became so proficient that he was hired a year later by Digital Equipment to write machine code to be used for analyses of data on the aurora borealis from Isis satellites. Going on to Carnegie Mellon University to study under the eminent Robert Sproull and Raj Reddy, he wrote a text editor called EMACS, a Pascal compiler and a thesis entailing the creation of a program to do drawings of levers and strings in visual, interactive models. After graduation in 1981, he joined an IBM lab in Pittsburgh, where he developed the Andrew Windows system. The first major program that could control a window on a computer remotely across a network, it never found a home. But it launched Gosling on a 15-year struggle with the challenge of how to send programs across a network that could be executed on other computers. Gosling had a breakthrough in 1983 at a Sun Microsystems conference at the Red Lion in San Jose. There, Bill Joy observed Gosling's Andrew Windows system dramatically outperforming a workstation running Sun View, and began a concerted effort to recruit him. Soon after, Gosling came to Sun to develop a remote windows system called NeWS (Networked Extensible Windows System). Initially received with great critical acclaim in the industry, it was eventually blocked by the X-Windows consortium despite performing far more efficiently over a network. Long a student of object-oriented programming beginning with the Simula language, Gosling followed his NeWS project with a compound document architecture, joining text and images. It, too, garnered much praise and paltry use. Then came Sun's ill-fated pursuit of consumer electronic products. Gosling set out to develop appropriate programs in C++. But it soon became clear to him that this language failed on nearly all the crucial criteria. In particular it was neither reliable nor secure, which, funnily enough, turned out to be two sides of the same coin. "The gun you shoot the burglar with can also shoot you in the foot." That is C++. It has pointer code that allows rogue programs to invade and corrupt a target operating system. Returning to the inspiration of Andrew and NeWS, he adapted Java to enable real-time operations across a network. In order to run a variety of different programs on a variety of linked devices, from set-top boxes to palmtop remotes, he made it inherently platform-neutral and nomadic. It would have to be a language at home on the network." What is Gosling working on now? Well, he is working on development environments for analyzing and manipulating algorithms. He wants to do more stuff with services and Java commerce. He is also focusing on high-performance numerical computing in Java. Gosling was also named as a member of Vitria's technology advisory board.
Every rapidly expanding and growing software technology market needs its money men to fund new enterprise creation. Java is no exception (pardon the pun). Ted Schlein came to the venture capital firm of KPCB (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) of Menlo Park, California, with significant experience in enterprise software business management at Symantec Corporation. Most recently he was Vice President of Networking and Client Server Technology. He was responsible for overseeing the marketing and development of enterprise products. Prior to that he served as Vice President of Symantec's European business development as Vice President Data Management Group. Mr. Schlein is credited with establishing Symantec in both the utilities and antivirus markets by starting and building these business units. Schlein holds a B.S. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the Partner in charge of the firm's $100 million Java fund. His father, Phil, is a partner at U.S. Venture Partners (also in Menlo Park) and sat on the board of Apple Computer Inc. in the late 1970's and early 1980's. And Schlein says one of his father's venture capital acquaintances influenced him at an early age. "When I was in ninth grade, I met Arthur Rock (who was also on Apple's board), and he told me what he did," Schlein says. "He told me he helped small things become big things, not just with money, but with knowledge." The largest single part of the Fund is committed from KPCB's institutional limited partners, which include 20 university endowments and foundations such as Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Yale, and the Mellon Foundation. One of the unique aspects of the Java Fund is the corporate partners. These include: Cisco Systems (the largest internetworking company), Comcast (a leading media/telecommunications company), Compaq (the leading supplier of PCs), IBM (the largest enterprise computing company), Itochu (a leading global trading group), Netscape (the leader in internet and intranet software), Oracle (the leading database company), Sun Microsystems (inventor of Java), TCI (a leading media/communications company), and USWest Media Group (a leading media/communications company). The KPCB Java Fund ventures include Active Software, AdKnowledge, Calico Technology, Extensity, Healtheon, Icarian, Impresse, Internet Security Systems, Intraware, Marimba, Netiva, Oblix, Pangea Systems, Resonate, Viant, and Wallop Software. So far, one Java fund company, Internet Security Systems Inc., has gone public. While Kleiner Perkins didn't opt for a board seat (the company's headquarters is in Atlanta), it did share in ISS's amazing success. In ISS's first day of trading (March 24), the company's share price went from its IPO price of $22 to close at $40.38. "Is Internet Security Systems worth $500 million (its market capitalization in May) if it only did $13 million in sales last year?" Schlein asks. "Who am I to argue?" Healtheon is another Java Fund company preparing to go public. Says Schlein, "I am degree-less. I don't have an MBA or any engineering degrees. What I've done all along is understand the technology from a market perspective. You've got to know enough to talk to engineers, as well as have an appreciation for the technology and how it will be used." Amy Oringel writes, "Ted Schlein's business acumen had a head start. As an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, Schlein used his Macintosh to start his first business, a resume company, which took a bite out of Kinko's' hold on the market. In 1986, Ted Schlein spent his summers off from the University of Pennsylvania working for start-ups in the Bay Area. When the second semester of his senior year rolled around, Schlein took his academic career off-campus and helped start Reality Technologies which produced PC simulation software based on Wharton's business school program. Schlein sold the distribution rights to gaming giant Electronic Arts and, with the help of an obliging economics professor, earned the final credits toward his degree. After graduating from Penn in 1986, Schlein was snatched up by Symantec as a marketing manager, where again his Macintosh ended up being the vehicle for his success. As the only Symantec employee using a Mac, Schlein came up with the idea to make Norton Utilities for that system. The move was a success and Schlein was chosen to head up the utilities division. Schlein's next project, Symantec's Anti-Virus for the Mac (SAM), ignited the virus craze and he headed further up the corporate ranks. As an investor in Symantec, many of the KPCB partners including John Doerr had worked closely with Schlein for years. They came calling with the opportunity to run the Java Fund and, in October 1996, Schlein accepted." Says Schlein, "No one knew if it was a good or bad idea, but we had a strong sense that Java would be one of the main enabling technologies of the Internet." So, what is Schlein investing in now? Well, the venture capital business is extremely competitive and secretive. One never wants to telegraph or tip off competing firms about what you are working on. But, I can guess. I hope that Schlein is looking at companies like the young Inline Software firm that is creating Java component building blocks for quick Java application generation.
Jim Waldo is the Chief Architect of the Sun Microsystems' JiniTM software technology project. As Bill Joy is Jini's patron and guiding spirit, Waldo serves as the implementor for Jini. He is a programming code jockey extraordinaire. He says, "We stopped only when we couldn't throw out anything else." That means that Jini is small and simple. Waldo is leading a team in the development of a distributed computing infrastructure for Java (Jini). He has been investigating the use of Java for distributed computing and persistence for the past 18 months. He is also the author of the "Java programming column" in Unix Review. Prior to joining JavaSoft, Jim was a principal investigator in Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he did research in the areas of object-oriented programming and systems, distributed computing, and user environments. Before joining Sun, Jim spent eight years at Apollo Computer and Hewlett Packard working in the areas of distributed object systems, user interfaces, class libraries, text and internationalization. An early adopter of the C++ language, Jim has written and spoken extensively on the use and abuse of object-oriented technology, edited the book The Evolution of C++: Language Design in the Marketplace of Ideas, and was the author of the "C++ Advisor" column in Unix Review. Jim received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). He also holds M.A. degrees in both linguistics and philosophy Waldo designed the Java protocols for Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and object serialization. His team has also done some advanced development in JavaSpaces. Waldo said, "The thing that I find interesting about Java is that it has changed the rules for developing software - we no longer think of programs as static entities that are compiled and linked, and then later run. Instead, we compile chunks, and then link-and-run, changing the components as the need arises. This has been a big change, but I don't think it is anything compared to what is going to happen when we really start using Java for distributed computing (Jini). Being able to move code around the network means that we can finally do object-oriented distributed computing; moving both data and the behavior of that data around. This really changes everything. We are no longer trapped in a world of static network protocols - the network has become an evolving, changing entity. Again, I don't know what this is going to lead us to, but it is going to be different, and it is going to be great fun getting there." So, where's Waldo? (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) So, what is Waldo working on now? Well, he dreams of Jini.
Ken Arnold serves as the Jini Technology Community Coordinator for Sun Microsystems, Incorporated. Ken Arnold is co-author, with James Gosling, of The JavaTM Programming Language book, part of the official Sun series of books on the Java language, packages, and environment that is published by Addison Wesley. He is a leading expert in object-oriented design and implementation and has written extensively on C and C++ topics for UNIX Review. Ken is also the co-author, with John Peyton, of A C User's Guide to ANSI C. Ken was part of the BSD team at U.C. Berkeley, where among other things, he created the curses library package for terminal-independent screen-oriented programs, and was co-author, with Mike Toy and Glen Wichman, of the computer game "rogue". Between Berkeley and Sun, Ken was part of the original Hewlett-Packard architectural team designing CORBA, worked on several user interface and UNIX projects at Apollo Computer, and with molecular graphics at U.C. San Francisco. Prior to Jini, Arnold worked with Jim Waldo on the Remote Method Invocation and object serialization team. Arnold was the main implementor of JavaSpaces. As the initial Jini technology community coordinator, Arnold will oversee Jini's future development. Ken will represent the Jini community outside of Sun, and he will work with the internal Sun development team to coordinate future upgrades. So, what is Arnold talking about now? Well, he is probably hammering out the specifics of the Jini Technology Public License (JTPL).
John M. Thompson is an IBM Senior Vice President and Group Executive for the IBM Software Group. For IBM, Java is a Godsend. IBM seethes with tens of operating systems: everything from VM, MVS, OS/2, OS/400, AIX up to RS/6000. Java runs on every single one of their platforms. It is the common thread that can tie all of IBM together and completely rationalize their chaotic platforms. IBM has over 3,000 software engineers working with Java. That's even more than Sun Microsystems! IBM has the Visual Age for Java development environment, Jikes, and the WebSphere Application Server. IBM has opened Java Porting and Tuning Centers, helped Sun ship JavaOS on time, and its alphaWorks group, IBM's cutting-edge Internet research and technology group, has released a package that installs the missing RMI support for the Microsoft virtual machine and Internet Explorer 4.0. So, what is Thompson working on now? Well, he is steering the porting of IBM's San Francisco component Frameworks to Sun's Enterprise JavaBeans specification and releasing On-Demand Server, a Java-based centralized application deployment and management architecture that draws partly from IBM's WorkSpace On-Demand technology.
Paul Gross is the Vice President in charge of the Developer Tools Division at Microsoft. Warning! This information is accurate as of September 2, 1998. Microsoft is notoriously secretive in concealing the identities of its internal management. And internal product development teams within Microsoft are constantly reorganizing. With that said, if my information is inaccurate, please insert the name of the current Vice President in charge of the Developer Tools Division for Microsoft here. In the summer of 1996, Borland was undergoing difficult times and management turnover, and Microsoft saw an opportunity. Paul Gross, Borland's Senior Vice President of Research and Development and a key leader of Borland's tools business as making a pitch to be Borland's new Chief Executive Officer. Borland, in turn, was trying to define Gross' role in Borland's future. Borland did not expect Gross to leave; and if he did, the last place Borland expected him to go was Microsoft. Gross had always been vehemently opposed to Microsoft and its way of doing business and had tried to discourage many of Borland's employees from taking jobs there. Representatives of Microsoft set their sights on Gross, however, and one day Brad Silverberg and Bob Muglia of Microsoft arrived outside of Borland's headquarters in a limousine to pick up Gross to recruit him over lunch at an expensive restaurant. Borland is informed and believes, and on that basis alleges, that as part of Microsoft's recruiting effort, Microsoft told Gross that they needed someone to oversee their tools business as they ramped up their software offerings for the Internet world, and Microsoft wanted Gross for this job. Gross had overseen the development of Borland's tools business and now Microsoft wanted him to do the same thing for it. As Gross put it, without even asking him to interview, "Microsoft gave him an offer he could not refuse." Borland is informed and believes, and on that basis alleges, that Microsoft's offer included a $1 million signing bonus, stock options and title to selected real estate in or near Redmond, Washington. Microsoft also informed Gross that it would increase the already substantial offer if he would accept it immediately, even though he had already scheduled a three month sabbatical to plan his wedding. Borland is informed and believes, and on that basis alleges, that Microsoft viewed Gross as key to its successful recruitment of Anders Hejlsberg and other Borland employees in Microsoft's ongoing effort to catch up with and eventually destroy Borland in the tools business. Borland is informed and believes, and on that basis alleges, that Bill Gates participated in the seduction of Gross and spoke to him several times, offering Gross increasing amounts of money to entice him to join Microsoft. Gross called Borland Director Bill Miller to say he was going to Microsoft. Borland is informed and believes, and on that basis alleges, that Microsoft had responded to Borland's efforts to keep Gross by immediately offering Gross an additional $500,000 to quit Borland that very day. Gross officially resigned on September 25, 1995. For Borland, it was too late to turn Gross around; his seduction by Microsoft was sealed by a compensation package worth well over $1.5 million despite the fact that Gross would not begin work at Microsoft for at least three months. As Vice President of the Developer Tools Division at Microsoft, Paul Gross is responsible for managing the development and marketing of their Visual J++ product. Before joining Microsoft in 1996, he was senior vice president of Research & Development at Borland International (now Inprise Corp.), a maker of software development tools. In his more than seven years at Borland, he held positions in general management, development, and product management for languages and client-server tools. Prior to joining Borland, he worked as a software engineer of programming languages at Gold Hill Computers and Infocom. He holds a bachelors degree in psychology from Wesleyan University. Gross is responsible for Microsoft shipping a non-compliant Java virtual machine with every copy of Windows. Their virtual machine does not support Java Native Interfaces, Java Foundation Classes, JavaBeans, nor does it natively support Sun's Remote Method Invocation. Gross is also responsible for Microsoft shipping Visual J++, the J/Direct technology, the Application Foundation Classes, and the Windows Foundation Classes. All of these are not Java. They, in no way, comply with the standard. And they violate Java's philosophy of "Write once, run anywhere." So, what is the Vice President in charge of the Developer Tools Division at Microsoft working on right now? Well, that person is probably working on releasing Microsoft's upcoming COM+ technology. Some aspects of COM+ are a multi-language bytecode, and a virtual machine. Gee, where have we heard of that before?
Anders Hejlsberg is the Chief Architect of the Windows Foundation Classes at Microsoft. Warning! This information is accurate as of March 11, 1998. Microsoft is notoriously secretive in concealing the identities of its internal management. And internal product development teams within Microsoft are constantly reorganizing. With that said, if my information is inaccurate, please insert the name of the current Chief Architect at Microsoft. In the Summer of 1995, Microsoft recruitment efforts led them to attempt to steal away Delphi's chief architect, Anders Hejlsberg from Borland (now Inprise Corporation). Microsoft, through Brad Silverberg, attempted to entice Hejlsberg to join Microsoft. Silverberg's and Microsoft's efforts failed after Borland succeeded in convincing Hejlsberg to stay. Microsoft's recruiting efforts at Borland, always relentless, became even more so after Paul Gross's crossover. Around the same time it recruited Gross, Microsoft renewed its efforts to convince Hejlsberg to join Microsoft. After the initial effort to recruit Hejlsberg failed, Silverberg had continued to contact Hejlsberg. In late September 1996, around the time Gross announced his intentions, Silverberg convinced Hejlsberg to take a trip up to Microsoft in Redmond to talk about his employment opportunities at Microsoft. Microsoft arranged this trip at a time when Borland was facing weak financial results, management turnover and badly needed the help and resources of its key employees. In Redmond, Hejlsberg was recruited by Bill Gates, Silverberg and other former Borland employees. Microsoft made a point of telling Hejlsberg how happy the many former Borlanders at Microsoft were. Hejlsberg was reluctant to leave California, but Microsoft offered him a $1.5 million signing bonus, over a base salary of approximately $150,000 to $200,000 and extremely lucrative options to purchase 75,000 Microsoft shares. Hejlsberg discussed the Microsoft offer with Borland management. He was clearly torn about what to do and invited a counter offer from Borland if it could be made quickly. He explained to Borland that a counter offer had to be forthcoming promptly because Microsoft had given him a short deadline for accepting its offer. On Friday, October 4, 1996, Borland director David Heller sent Hejlsberg Borland's counter offer. Hejlsberg seemed pleased by Borland's offer and the opportunity it gave him to stay in California. He indicated to Heller that day that he thought he would accept Borland's offer. On Saturday morning (the next day), however, Hejlsberg called Heller and said he now felt he had to accept Microsoft's offer. Indeed, overnight and in response to Borland's offer, Microsoft had promised Hejlsberg another $1.5 million to join it. Hejlsberg indicated to Heller that Bill Gates had been applying "incessant" and "intense" pressure to get him to work at Microsoft. On October 30, 1996, Hejlsberg, the principal architect of Borland's Delphi product and a significant participant in Borland's future product development plans, left Borland and went to work for Microsoft developing "Delphi for Java." He is a Danish citizen. He was born in Denmark and raised there. Hejlsberg joined Microsoft a year and a half ago, following a 13-year career at Borland International (now Inprise Corporation), where he was chief architect of Delphi, Turbo Pascal, and other tools. Before moving to California and becoming one of Borland's original employees, he learned how to develop software in his native Denmark. Hejlsberg is responsible for the WFC (Windows Foundation Classes). Eight Microsoft programmers are working on WFC. WFC is not Java. They, in no way, comply with the standard. And they violate Java's philosophy of "Write once, run anywhere." Hejlsberg is also responsible for the Visual J++ development environment supporting a language construct called delegates or bound method references. This construct, and the new keywords, "delegate" and "multicast", introduced to support it, are not a part of the JavaTM programming language. It is unlikely that the Java programming language will ever include this construct. Sun already carefully considered adopting it in 1996, to the extent of building and discarding working prototypes. Their conclusion was that bound method references are unnecessary and detrimental to the language. This decision was made in consultation with Borland International (now Inprise Corporation), who had previous experience with bound method references in Delphi Object Pascal. Sun believes bound method references are unnecessary because another design alternative, inner classes, provides equal or superior functionality. In particular, inner classes fully support the requirements of user-interface event handling, and have been used to implement a user-interface API at least as comprehensive as the Windows Foundation Classes. Sun believes bound method references are harmful because they detract from the simplicity of the Java programming language and the pervasively object-oriented character of the API's. Bound method references also introduce irregularity into the language syntax and scoping rules. Finally, they dilute the investment in Java virtual machine technologies because Java virtual machines are required to handle additional and disparate types of references and method linkage efficiently. So, what is the current Chief Architect at Microsoft working on now? Well, that person is probably working on making Visual J++ more like COM+ and even less like true Java, making Visual J++ transaction-aware components for use with Microsoft Transaction Server, probably investigating whether to add new classes that encapsulate Dynamic HTML, MS Message Queuing (MSMQ) as well as Active Directory services (ADSI).
Sincerely,
Mark Kuharich
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