Time magazine considered her one of the most influential people in America in 1997.
But fate is a fickle friend, and Kim Polese then embarked on a celebrity roller-coaster ride that took her from being the Web's "it girl" to a dot-bomb trivia answer in the wink of an eye.
Polese, founder of Marimba and formerly the public face of Java for Sun Microsystems, is now back in the limelight -- this time as chief executive of SpikeSource, an open-source services company catering to corporate customers. And just like during the early days of the Web, Polese believes she's at the front of something big.
Talking about the future of the industry with CNET News.com, she said the combination of readily available software components, on the one hand, and the Web for collaboration on the other will usher in a golden period for the software industry.
Q: Silicon Valley went through a tremendous slump the past few years, and of course there's the whole debate over whether IT matters. Do you think the best minds are still working here, or are other areas of technology more compelling?
A: Actually, I think that we are at the onset of a renaissance in the software industry. The reason is that the industry is maturing. But that's not a bad thing -- that's a good thing.
Software is going everywhere in every conceivable appliance or object that we interact with in daily life. The total market size is increasing, not getting smaller and not shrinking. All of that together means renaissance, means growth, means driving in the next generation of the software business.
What do you make of people like Larry Ellison who predict that there will be massive consolidation in the software industry?
I agree with Larry that the industry as we know it today is consolidating and that a lot of start-ups are going away because you cannot manage the cost, the overhead of the sales force, and all the things that you need to do to compete against a big company. But there is a new crop. There is a new generation of companies that are utilising the Web to deliver their services and that are utilising open-source software and creating innovations that take advantage of the commodity, of the abundance. And that's perhaps something that people have missed.
Comparing this era to the early days of the Web, do you think open source is going to have the same sort of buzz or hype that we saw back in the mid- to late 1990s?
Well, I don't expect to see that level of hype ever again in my life -- at least in this industry. I think that was just the product of a pretty unique time, when the Web burst upon the scene, and people started thinking about where this could go. They jumped to the ultimate end goal and realised this thing is big. And then, of course, Silicon Valley became the new Hollywood, and we -- Marimba and I -- happened to be caught up in that.
Is the idea of SpikeSource to make it look like there's a commercial outfit like an IBM or Microsoft behind a set of open-source products?
Yeah. What is sort of interesting right now is that IT developers, architects and chief information officers are aggressively adopting open source. The problem has become how to manage the abundance. There are more than 85,000 different open-source projects today.
All the things that IT is used to, like support documentation, reliability, road maps -- none of that exists for open source when you start moving beyond a single component. When you start talking about actually integrating the components into applications, there is no sort of product management for open source. That is where we see an opportunity.
