A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

A rising tide lifts all boats. If there were ever a philosophy that guided our decision making at Sun, it's that - the notion that an internet connected by freely available standards is more valuable, to Sun and our customers, than one defined by dependencies on proprietary technologies. Although the metaphor doesn't translate particularly well (I know, I've tortured translators around the world), the concept is familiar to nearly everyone, no matter the industry or geography. History is replete with examples of failed efforts to defeat standardization. My personal favorite is Thomas Edison's attempt to patent the lightbulb, so he could threaten litigation against anyone using an "infringing" non-Edison client bulb attached to his servers generators. And there are just as many success stories for broadly adopted standards, from shipping containers to power grids, air traffic control to the Java platform itself. Few folks, at least outside of Sun, understand how pervasively successful the Java platform, and the community supporting it, have been over the past decade. But Java runs on more devices than Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, Symbian and the Mac combined. Nearly 4 billion devices at this point, from smart cards to consumer devices, DVD players to set top boxes, medical equipment, all the way up into the majority of the world's transactional systems and 8 out of every 10 cellphones sold. The Java platform is, already, a global...

Date: November, 13 2006
Url: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/fueling_the_network_effect

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