ay from the company's operations. In a small lab in Palo Alto, Gosling came up with Java, Sun's popular programming language and the new linchpin of Sun's strategy. How Sun harnessed Java is another case of the company's mix of boldness and pragmatism.When it was launched in 1995, McNealy billed Java-a language intended to create software that can run unchanged on any kind of computer-as a killer of Microsoft's Windows. Sun said Java ideally was suited for a new kind of machine dubbed the network computer. The low-cost NC would have no hard disk, instead relying on a network that would supply it with small Java programs. The NC, according to McNealy and Sun ally Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corp., would replace personal computers and, in turn, dethrone Microsoft. The NC never took off for a variety of reasons, including the fact that PCs got cheaper and easier to use, thereby eliminating two of the pitfalls the NC was seeking to solve.What's more, Java was dogged by performance problems that made it less popular for creating the type of software that would run on an NC. Instead, Java gained enthusiasts among developers who wrote programs for powerful server computers. Sun shifted its development and marketing of Java accordingly, creating extensions to Java that make it more useful for running on servers, and designing subsets of the language for small appliances. Now Sun is trumpeting Java as the key to the NC's close relative: network computing. That, according to Sun, is when computing will shift away from PCs and toward consumer appliances such as phones, digital assistants and televisions that are able to access the wealth of information on the Internet. Java will be the glue that links powerful server computers, preferably Sun's, with the billions of computing devices that are expected to flood the market in the next few years. Sun is hoping to make access to the Internet and computing as simple as picking up a phone. Instead of a...
