McNealy says computer industry is still in its infancy

Never mind the troubles the computer and networking industries have been

experiencing in the past 18 months. The industry is still in its infancy,

according to a buoyant Sun Microsystems, CEO Scott McNealy as said in his

keynote address at the JavaOne trade show in San Francisco.

"I would say we are still in the very early days in the computer world.

There is a massive amount of stuff that is not being captured by the Net,"

McNealy said, adding that the Internet was growing fast enough to require future

innovation at a breakneck pace.

While Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina has said the merger

between Compaq and HP is a result of the maturing of the computer industry,

NcNealy said the merger was driven by the failure of the two firms to develop

new technologies and instead rely on chips and software from other firms.

"The industry has not matured. You've got to spend in R&D. Dell doesn't

do R&D," McNealy said.

The future will see an increasing migration of everything from cell

telephones and chip implants to light bulb sockets being connected to the

Internet. "And that is going to require an immense amount of servers and

infrastructure," he said.

McNealy used the keynote to express his distaste of Microsoft, referring to

the company as "the dark side." McNealy also referred to Microsoft's

.NET platform as "dot not" and said Java will win the battle with .NET

because of its ability to work on a variety of operating systems.

McNealy urged developers to decline offers from Microsoft for help developing

.NET products, which he said would tie them into a proprietary architecture

rather than Java's open one. "You know that first hit of heroin is

free".

At JavaOne, Sun announced a new set of Java tools for creating programs to

let cell phones, personal organizers and other wireless devices work better on

the Internet.

The new tools let developers create programs to offer wireless access to

medical records or the purchase of airline tickets, said Rich Green, Sun vice

president of Java and XML. Sun also unveiled a new, faster version of its Java

virtual machine. In combination with next-generation wireless networks, it will

allow people to watch TV and view three-dimensional graphics and video programs

on their handheld devices, Green said.

Sun is collaborating with Ontario-based Research In Motion (RIM) on tools to

create applications that can link back-office databases and other programs to

wireless devices. With a RIM two-way pager users can, for example, access a

corporate order sales processing program to check the status of a customer order

or back-ordered equipment and pricing via an application rather than a Web

browser. "Everybody's been talking about extending these applications. But

previous efforts have failed for lack of security and flexibility," said

Jim Balsillie, co-chief executive of RIM.