As a result, software developers first adopted the Java virtual machine on the Wintel PC as a way of getting on the Microsoft desktop while limiting their exposure to Wintel change. They then pushed Java onto the server in response to escalating security and performance issues on that desktop PC.
Java is now a key component of Sun's overall business strategy, but there's absolutely nothing to suggest that Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Andy Bechtolsheim or Gosling had the faintest idea in January 1991 that Java would eventually form the mold shaping Sun's commercial software as a mirror image response to Microsoft's mind-share dominance.
Of course, that was yesterday. Tomorrow most of Solaris will be open source, and the question is whether history will repeat itself with the unanticipated consequences ultimately becoming of greater strategic importance to the company than anything management planned for.
At least part of what Sun's senior people intend to do with Open Solaris is pretty clear. The licence Sun plans to use fundamentally says that extensions or improvements on open-source code have to be open source too, but plug-ins to open-source code do not. This lets developers have their cake and eat it too: working within an open-source environment while retaining the opportunity to realise on any competitive advantage arising from their intellectual property.
That should attract a lot of Linux developers to Solaris because its ability to run Linux applications means that they can build for Linux while sheltering their work under the Sun licence -- and simultaneously escape the limitations of x86 by getting into the SPARC market.
Since developers are the lifeblood of a systems company, attracting more of the better ones is pretty strategic -- in fact, this is business cool at its best and clearly what Sun's top executives intended when they undertook the process.
Like Java, however, Open Solaris may play an unexpected role in Sun's longer term strategic positioning -- in this case vis-a-vis IBM, not Microsoft.
I believe IBM is effectively taking over Linux, not through ownership but by influencing the influencers: manipulating the people and press involved in guiding its use, evolution and acceptance. Witness, for example, IBM's success in manipulating the press and lots of serious Linux players with regard first to the SCO lawsuit and, more recently, in the fawning attention paid its opening of 500 mostly expiring, and mostly irrelevant to open source, patents.
As Linux succeeds, it diminishes the role of Windows, and therefore, the importance of Java outside the telecommunications and related embedded processor arenas. In effect, I think we'll see Java's data centre role becoming "collateral damage" as IBM uses Linux to take out Microsoft. That might be bad news for Sun, except that Open Solaris redresses the balance: favoring Linux over Microsoft but dramatically tilting the open-source playing field Sun's way.
Assuming it does play out that way, Open Solaris may go down in history as one the finest examples of business strategy ever -- unless, of course, it's just dumb luck.
biography
Paul Murphy wrote and published The Unix Guide to Defenestration. He is a 20-year veteran of the IT consulting industry.
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