Microsoft is clearly Windows-centric, but it has worked with other companies on standards like Web services.
The Web service part of it is quite wonderful. That works pretty well.
But when it comes to the tools, if you use its Visual Studio .Net tool, you are completely locked in to everything they did. You have no interoperability with other platforms -- other than by doing remote messaging, for which you can't actually run your application on non-Windows platforms.
Whereas if you use NetBeans, you can run the application on an IBM platform, and if you use Eclipse, you can not only run Eclipse on a Sun platform, but you can run the application that you create on a Sun platform -- and you can do neither of those with Visual Studio. All that the Web services stuff gives you is the ability to talk to somebody else. It doesn't give developers the ability to develop applications that run on other platforms. So it is really a very, very weak form of interoperability.
Can you talk a little bit about your new job? What is on your to-do list?
I had spent several years as kind of the poster boy of the software organisation, which really got sort of long. So, I ended up taking... a real technologist's vacation -- which is what I really love doing -- actually sitting down and writing code at Sun Labs. And the stuff that I had been working on was all about developer tools. The project I worked on soon got to the point where it was not a science project anymore; it has really become sort of an engineering-with-science project, and as such, it made more sense to try to get it into products.
So I kind of have two goals in my new job: one is to actually take the last two years of my life and sort of find it a home and get it out there and do some really advanced, interesting stuff with tools. The other is to wear a more general CTO hat, which has some component of talking to the press and some component of working on the group strategy and working with customers and the rest of that.
My goals are sort of a bit of everything, and the high-level goal for me is really to make Sun's tools be the best, most advanced, most interesting out there. We have got an awful lot of good stuff now, and I think the opportunities are pretty darn cool.
