Sun Microsystems Inc chief executive Scott McNealy was holding forth on the state of, and the prospects for, the North American information technology industry at Comdex/Canada last week. He thinks proprietary technology should be replaced and says the computer industry is not opening up. It’s becoming tragically closed. Capitalism requires open interfaces. Cranking the mill, he claims that Sun is spearheading the entire Unix community.
Word tax
He said Microsoft Corp’s proprietary interfaces are akin to a person inventing a new language, registering it with the government and levying a word tax. Sun, meanwhile, is pushing its Public Windows Interface initiative. Intel owns the hardware alphabet and Novell is on its way to owning the network alphabet, he said, but had to admit that if Sun were as large as Microsoft, it would also seek to close its technologies to the public and charge royalties for their use. I think people will look back on the 1980s and 1990s and say that Intel and Microsoft stifled innovation, he said. But monopolists with proprietary technology should not be considered wrong or criminal, McNealy said. He compared them with greyhounds chasing a motorised hare in a dog race. If one of the dogs is fast enough to catch the bunny, they stop the race and take the bunny away from the dog, he told reporters. Then they bronze the dog and put it up on a pedestal in front of the track with ‘superdog’ or something underneath. That’s what should happen to Bill Gates. He ought to be bronzed, McNealy added. Meanwhile, he believes three hardware architectures – Intel Corp’s Pentium, IBM Corp and Motorola Inc’s PowerPC and Sun’s Sparc – and three operating systems – Microsoft Corp Windows NT, IBM OS/2, and Sun Solaris – will survive into the future, with three object models becoming the bases of an object-oriented computing world of the future. IBM and Apple Computer Inc’s Taligent, Microsoft’s technology and Object Management Group standard which Sun has implemented as Distributed Objects Everywhere.
