McNealy Proposes Next Phase In Client/Server

No surprise --it's the Net and Java

By Richard Cole

On Thursday, the second morning of UniForum '96 featured a keynote address by Scott McNealy, chairman and CEO of Sun Microsystems. Well-known in the IT industry for a calculated outrageousness, McNealy delivered a free-wheeling speech on the state of the industry, his vision of future desktop computing and the latest developments in Java and client/server computing from Sun.

Eschewing a business suit for casual slacks and a white polo shirt with the Sun logo and his e-mail address on the front ("I thought I'd nerd it up today for everyone"), McNealy cheerfully took the contrary position on a number of industry issues. While supporting the core efforts to standardize Unix systems, he argued against a single flavor of Unix. "Choice is good. Different environments have different requirements." He mentioned in passing that standards aren't set by standards bodies or "two little companies getting together," the latter a tweak at Wednesday's joint announcement of progress on consolidating Unix by Hewlett-Packard and the Santa Cruz Operation.

No-Sweat Clients

After his rambling general remarks (guaranteed, he said, to drive his marketing people crazy), McNealy shifted direction, to focus on the next phase of client computing. He noted that the once vaunted promise to "put a mainframe on every desktop" had come true. This, he said, simply creates "hairball" computers that shift the complexities of mainframe administration to individual users. He reasoned that it would be better to keep desktop and client computers as simply engineered, or "thin," as possible.

This vision of thin clients led McNealy to Java, his announced topic and the one probably foremost in the minds of his audience. Developed at Sun, Java is Internet-based, platform-independent technology that allows, among other things, small applications ("applets") to run on and be downloaded from the Web. Since both software and data can be easily downloaded from servers with Java, a desktop computer may not need a diskette drive or hard disk storage.

At this point, McNealy called a Sun technician to the stage and launched into a demonstration of a model of Sun's Java client, a system unit about the size of a one-volume dictionary. The unit had a regular-size monitor attached but no hard disk or diskette or CD-ROM drive. It supported a stripped-down operating system, which McNealy called "Java on bare metal." He claimed that it could be a "zero-administration client," far easier to administer and use than present clients. At the same time, he stressed that he wasn't proposing just another terminal, whether "dumb," X-based or Internet-specific like the one being developed by Oracle Corp. By downloading applets and data from the Internet, McNealy said, the Java client could handle most functions now performed by larger desktops.

McNealy was careful to stress what Java was not. "It's not the universal answer. You don't want to write all your applications in Java." He pointed out that television didn't mean the extinction of radios, and in the same way, Java won't supplant existing technology. Rather, it will be an additional avenue for future developments.

McNealy added that Sun will continue to distribute Java free of charge for the public. "We won't make money on Java, but we'll make money doing things on Java," he said, such as selling client and server hardware. His address gave UniForum attendees a preview of how Sun plans to accomplish that goal.