From: Bill Gates
Sent: Monday, September 30, 1996 9:36 PM
To: Nathan Myhrvold
Cc: Aaron Contorer
Subject: Java runtime becomes the operating system
I am worry a lot about how great Java/Javabeans and all the runtime work they are doing is and how much excitement this is generating. I am literally losing sleep over this issue since together with a move to more server based applications it seems like it could make it easy for people to do competitive operating systems.
I am very interested to get your thoughts on this. Prior to the advanced work you are driving what kind of defenses do we have against this? I certainly havent’ come up with enough to relax about the situation and it is undermining my creativity.
From: Nathan Myhrvold
Sent: Tuesday, October 01, 1996 12:05 PM
To: Bill Gates
Cc: Aaron Contorer
Subject: RE: Java runtime becomes the operating system
I agree that this is a dilemma, but I don’t think that it is severe enough that you should lose sleep over it. Here are some quick thoughts on the matter – I will put more time in on it also.
First, the excitement is overblown – at least from a *business* perspective. At the moment Java is expanding into a vacuum. It allows you to make cool web pages, and that is a very attractive thing for people. It gives programmers something new to learn, book people something new to sell books on, software tool companies a way to issue new development tools etc.
As you and know very well, this sort of widespread interest can become a self fullfilling phenomenon, because programmer attention creates programs. Some of these will be successful and that only fuels more participation in the phenomenon. However, at the same time you must keep something of a balanced perspective.
I think that the risk of Sun really taking the OS franchise away from us is much lower than the risk that they cheapen the entire business. They are so hell bent to give things away, and there is so much cross platform ferver that it will be hard for them or others to harness this energy toward a single platform In the limit, they can make the web totally OS agnostic – but there will still be other things that motivate one platform versus another.
In the very long run they could make it more and more difficult for us to keep up and thus even though the world is cross platform, we have more baggage, worse implementation and can’t keep up. This is NOT going to happen quickly however – we will get several more swings at them
The new Java applications are NOT credible threats to traditional PC software any time soon. It is just insanity to think that they are. New things are NEVER a threat to the old world as soon as people say. Look at the mainframe vs PC. It has taken us TWO DECADES and even after all that IBM still
