Tuesday February 28, 2006

I'm Not Dead Yet...

About four or five years ago, I sat with a number of CIOs and got grilled in meeting after meeting. I had just taken over running the Solaris business unit for Sun and wanted to hear first-hand what customers wanted from the next release of Solaris-still some three years away at that point. Most of the input was simple. “Kill it.” At least they were direct. “Solaris doesn't matter. Just do Linux.” That one hurt. In most customers' eyes, Solaris was yesterday's technology. It was “tired.”

Fast forward four years and Solaris is the talk of the town. Unparalleled features, scale and security. Open sourced. Free. Not just alive, but relevant as an option offered to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Remember Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “I'm not dead yet...”

Two years ago, I had similar conversations with developers about Netbeans which came to same conclusion, “It's dead.” Most were just conceding all Java development to Eclipse. But lately, NetBeans is beginning to turn heads-Java developers' heads. I am not ready to claim full success. I am ready to say that, although it was once left for dead, today, NetBeans is gaining considerable traction (more than 1 million users in the world today!) and has become a solid option to Eclipse. Options mean you have choice. Choice means competition. That's good for developers, good for customer and, yes, good for us.

Here's some support. Last week in Chennai, India, we had the biggest turn-out ever for a "Netbeans Day" event -nearly 1,000 people. It was standing room only with people out the door. It was geeks talking to geeks. Not a suit to be found for miles. The great thing about the Indian development community, they are fanatics. They like to work with the latest technology and are digital sponges when it comes to soaking up all they can about what's new and what's coming. At some point, I'd like to get Don King to promote a WWF wrestling match with developers from India and Brazil in a “no-holds-barred, develop-to-the-death” coding bake-off. We could call it WWWF. I digress.

If you're going to develop Java services, you'd be foolish not to at least take a look at the latest tools from Sun: the NetBeans IDE, Java Studio Creator, and Java Studio Enterprise . If you haven't seen them lately, then you haven't seen them at all. Entry-to-enterprise tools that are far more intuitive, easier to use and free. Not free like free beer but actually free. The reviews are now starting to roll in. Again, I won't claim success. Not yet.

Until then, “in this corner, at five feet, eight inches and 156 pounds, a man from Bangalore who once hacked into the hospital records system in an attempt to change his name to Jamir Gosling.... ...and in this corner, from Sao Paolo, in the yellow and green shorts, a welterweight who once stayed up for three consecutive days with nothing but caffeine drinks and 27 pistachios to meet a product deadline...”