Surfing Silicon Valley

By San Francisco Bureau Chief Greg Lefevre

April 2, 1998
Web posted at: 4:13 PM EST (1613 GMT)

SUN-ny days?

Java enthusiasts were flying high at the JavaOne love fest in San Francisco last week. It was reminiscent of recent Macworld Expos, where the fans of the also-ran formats gathered to prove that their system is best.

Sun Microsystems chief Scott McNealy got great news in the middle of the confab, that a San Jose federal judge had ordered Microsoft to keep the Java "coffee cup" logo off its version of Java-for-Windows-only software. McNealy needed the news. He'd just had a deal fall apart with Hewlett-Packard, which had announced its own version of the software.

McNealy is struggling on two somewhat contradictory fronts:

¥ He's touting the universality of his software, that it will run anywhere, on anything.

¥ He's also struggling to keep the patent on the genie while handing the genie's bottle around to anyone who'll rub it with him.

Sun need only look over its shoulder in Silicon Valley to see what a tightly controlled proprietorship does to a splendid operating system. Apple had a three- to five-year lead on Microsoft Windows with the Mac OS and chose not to share it.

Whose operating system is number one now? Not MacOS and not Java.

Do you have the code?

Up the road at Netscape, Mark Andreeson is doing the exact opposite. He's handing out keys to his browser kingdom in hopes someone will use them to open up some better ideas.

The theory goes this way: Andreeson gives out the core operating code to Netscape's browser technology. An independent software designer tweaks it this way, then that, making it a better product. Netscape gets to incorporate the changes into later versions and thus races ahead of its competitor. Andreeson should hope the contracts attached to those handouts are well written.

Surf's up!

Harkening back to the time when I surfed waves instead of the Net, I was relieved to see the K2 Challenge end. K2, an outdoors equipment supplier, offered $50,000 to surf, and survive, the biggest El Nino wave. The prize this week went to Taylor Knox of Carlsbad, California, for a monster 52-foot tall ride at Todo Santos off Mexico's coast.

Other huge waves have been coming at Mavericks, a weird swell point south of San Francisco. With every high surf warning, and there have been plenty this winter, we'd cringe to see how many surfers would get pounded trying to win the prize. Plenty did.

By the way, Hawaii got aced out this year. A fluke of El Nino, the waves missed Hawaii and hit the West Coast instead. Usually the home of big surf, the islands did not come up with the consistently huge stuff we saw here in California.

Surf on ...

Related stories:

• Surfing Silicon Valley: Spam scram
• Surfing south of market

Related sites:

• Sun Microsystems
• Netscape Communications
• Microsoft Corporation
• Surfline: K2 Big Wave Challenge

  External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive

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