Promising that the Java market will be worth $1bn this year, JavaSoft president Alan Baratz says most of his division’s $250m revenues are derived from Java license sales. This does not cover the cost of developing and maintaining Java, something CEO Scott McNealy said he’d happily hand over to someone else like Hewlett- Packard Co. So when will revenue from Java royalties begin to show up on the SUNW bottom line? Merrill Lynch & Co’s Steve Milunovich believes Sun will begin to receive a meaningful royalty stream in the second half of calendar 1999. Whether or not HP manages to fracture Java with its own virtual machine implementation, Milunovich is confident that Sun’s positioning as the ‘Microsoft alternative’ is working and that demand for Unix products will remain strong for at least two years. Sun CEO Scott McNealy says Java revenue already feeds into all the company’s sales and says Wall Street wants Sun to charge more for Java than it currently does.
