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The creator of Java and a major
player in the development of new internet technologies. Founded by a group
of Stanford University graduates, Sun's original strength was as a
supplier of high-powered workstations built on its own Sparc
microprocessors and running the unix operating system. But in the
1990s as Microsoft windows and Intel chips (known collectively as
Wintel) become increasingly dominant and demand for Sun's products slowed.
So the company turned to its talented engineers (including Bill Joy, who
rewrote one version of Unix to include support for tcp / ip, among
other things) to produce a system that could take the battle back to the
Wintel giant. The eventual result was Java, A language designed to
run on any computer and, by extension, remove people's dependence on
windows and Pentium processors.
JAVA has been a tremendous
success in the programming community but some of Sun's recent high-profile
ventures have stalled, including the much vaunted but largely ignored
Jini, a system for connecting electronic devices together intelligently.
Sun still relies on sales of powerful workstations and servers for
the bulk of its revenue, but it is active in its pursuit of revenue from
software sources, most notably web services, in which it remains a
strong competitor to Microsoft. |
