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Quick Death for JavaOS

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the another-one-bites-the-dust dept.

Bill Brooks writes "Sun and IBM announced that they are bailing out of working together on JavaOS for Business. If you've never heard of it, JavaOS for Business was a project that Sun and IBM agreed to work on together to produce a new version of an operating system that would run Java software on so-called 'thin clients.' The operating itself has only been around, in an embryonic form, since May of 1995, and the Sun/IBM joint venture started in 1997, shipping its first release in August of last year. A commercial operating system axed a year into its first release. Is M$ the only software company that can give a commercial OS time to find its market?"

4 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Drivers are in Java by timur · · Score: 2

    The drivers are also written in Java. I think C was an option, but the idea was that you would be able to write your driver entirely in Java if you wanted to.

  2. JavaOS not written in Java by Matts · · Score: 2

    I don't know where people here have their sources from, but javaOS isn't written in Java. The name was simply a marketing ploy, and to indicate the fact that it would have been "The best platform to run Java on".

    JavaOS was purchased by Sun. It was originally called ChaOS, by some french company. A small real time OS IIRC. Do a net search for it - there may still be some URL's left about it.

    Matt.

    perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-: ,hacker Perl another Just)'

    --

    Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
  3. This was the SECOND JavaOS to be canned by Big+Jojo · · Score: 2

    The first JavaOS was essentially a research project, writing an OS in Java to see what was missing from JDK 1.0 ... slow as all get-out. The outside world heard about it because Sun was crazy to pitch Java as usable for everything. (I mean that in multiple senses!) So it jumped straight from research to "product".

    The second JavaOS ("JavaOS for Business") was basically JDK 1.1 hosted on top of a real time OS that Sun had bought, "Chorus". Somehow that never got ported to enough different platforms to make Chorus a better choice than one of the better established real time OS configs. It was the right idea, but the core OS wasn't portable enough to be interesting to its target customers - they couldn't create commodity hardware and compete purely on the cost of the resulting "thin client" systems.

    Sun has a curious attitude towards Operating System Software. They want to own it, since if it integrates smoothly with their hardware, they can get some competitive advantages. It's not so odd, really, it's pretty traditional; but it's also far from their Open Systems for Open Minds roots. So they keep trying to do OS research to create some proprietary value. Going for a "big win" of some kind without understanding that customers still value the "open systems" model, still value the fact that Sun's competing on execution (and fumbles sometimes) rather than relying on vendor lockin. (They go to MSFT for that game.)

    The Spring OS was nothing but a research project, and it never performed well enough to make anyone really want to run it. But it got funded for years (instead of layered software products) as sort of a mascot for a proprietary OS technology. When Spring got canned, many of the same folk went to do JavaOS I (the research project), which got canned for the same reasons Spring did: it was a big, slow non-solution to a non-problem. So nobody would choose to buy it. It got forced down their throats as the guts of the first JavaStation, and they chose not to buy.

    JavaOS for Business wasn't needed either. Just take an off-the-shelf RTOS and slap a JDK on it. You're in business. Just -- Sun could never control that hardware infrastructure, it'd be too open. Great software model; but they want to make hardware money instead.

    Canning this project was overdue, and is no loss at all from the business or technical perspectives. None at all. (Though doesn't it make you wonder what will replace it? :-)

    - Jojo

  4. IBM is just screwed up by timur · · Score: 2
    The truth of the matter is that IBM is just one completely screwed up company. They cannot create ANY kind of excitement around any of their products. IBM is a complete loser when it comes to software. Look at OS/2: fantastic technology and a fantastic product (I use it every day), but the IBM leaders just could not get the entire company behind it. Same with JavaOS. IBM is a service company. Yes, they sell hardware and software, but they can't convince anyone to buy any of it. OS/2 is just one example. Did you know that they tried to create an office suite that would compete against MS Office?

    The hardware is no different. The PC Company lost $1B last year. That's a staggering amoung. And the people who make AS/400's don't do ANY marketing whatsoever - they don't even know how their products compare against other computers, because their marketing people just sit on their fat asses and don't do anything.

    I used to be a programmer at IBM, but I left disgusted. I can't understand how ANYONE would want to be a programmer at IBM - no one really gives a damn about your product, and entire multi-million dollar projects involving dozens or hundreds of people can easily get cancelled in one day.

    Don't blame JavaOS - it's a great idea. But the people at Sun who thought that IBM would stick with it are completely naive.