Interview: Sun's Eric Schmidt Sizes Up Internet Rivals
By Nick Wingfield
InfoWorld (US) Category: Product/Technology News\Networking
SAN MATEO (10-16-95) - Eric Schmidt, chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems Inc., says
his company will use the Internet to outmaneuver Microsoft Corp. and co-opt Lotus Notes. In an
interview with InfoWorld reporter Nick Wingfield, he explains how.
INFOWORLD: Right now it seems every single IT vendor out there is articulating some sort of
Internet strategy. Beyond e-mail, why do you think it's so important for corporations to pay
attention to the Internet right now?
SCHMIDT: The Internet is the largest single proving ground for new networking technologies. And
therefore the most innovative and interesting networking hardware and software will become
available in an Internet- centric way. All of the vendors that I talk with are now fighting to move to
Internet protocols, having failed at establishing theirs as the global standards. It's now very clear that
every corporation will have the majority of its computers connected to a corporate internet.
What we have come upon is the first real new paradigm in computing in the past 15 years. I think
the next set of user interfaces that will be offered to vendors and to corporate customers will be
HTML-based.
In other words, rather than loading client software on every PC, which is very time-intensive,
customers will use bundled Web browsers from Microsoft or Netscape to view a page, which is
really a program. Historically, Microsoft has had a lock on corporate desktops because of the
applications that uniquely run on Microsoft's products, but HTML browsers run on not just
Microsoft products, but also Apple and Unix and others.
INFOWORLD: Others would argue a Web browser is just an application for viewing static
documents. Java is a programming language that will spruce up the look-and-feel of Web pages by
adding animations and other dynamic content, but what else can the IS manager expect from Java?
SCHMIDT: I think for the IS manager the first thing they'll see in Java is financial analysis and data
mining applications. Java is perfect for applications that are networkcentric, where they have to go
into the company to get data from many different servers and then analyze and display that data.
Java is a general-purpose programming language, and its competitor is C++. It's very much a
successor to C. So we hope that a majority of the new C++ programmers will choose to use Java
to write network applications. It's a language, so it's not limited to the Internet. In fact, the language
was designed for digital set-top boxes. It was only in the last year that we targeted it toward the
Internet.
INFOWORLD: What do you think it's going to take to make Internet software a replacement for
Lotus Notes?
SCHMIDT: It's a tall order to replace all of Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes is a 10-year-old system with
tremendous functionality. It has more than a thousand applications that run on top of it. So what I
think is going to happen is that corporations will end up using both. The Web will be used for
unstructured data. Corporations are filled with data that is produced in the normal course of
business that is not indexed, that is not stored in databases. No one quite knows what it's all about.
There is a hidden explosion in corporations today where, unbeknownst to the IS managers,
technical employees are taking all the digital garbage off their desktops and putting it on the Web
servers. And they're doing it because they want to publish internally. They want their peer groups to
have access to every memo, their every thought, their every utterance.
The Web will come to have more and more of the functionality of Lotus Notes. It's already a major
data repository, as I mentioned ... but in an unstructured way. It's now beginning to have more of
the workgroup mail and calendaring and scheduling capabilities that Notes has. The last and hardest
part of what Lotus does for the Web to take over will be data replication. And I don't know how
long that will take. At the same time, Lotus has indicated that they have an aggressive program to
make the Notes facilities available to Web browsers. And so my prediction is the Web will grow
and Notes will grow in corporations ... and they will end up coexisting quite well.
INFOWORLD: Do you think the Internet really is a viable alternative to private networks? There
are lots of reliability issues, such as guaranteed bandwidth and security.
SCHMIDT: The Internet is an alternative for intermittent or slow speed connections. If you were
setting up a corporate network today you would use the Internet to get to those far away places that
don't have a lot of bandwidth requirements.
I believe security is the biggest growing business in the Internet today because the internal customer
demands access to the external 'net ... and the CIO has valid concerns about corporate data being
compromised.
Almost all the customers I've talked with do not have a full detailed security plan. They need to have
a plan for how many connections they will have and what the rules for access will be, just as they
have security plans for access to the data center.
INFOWORLD: So are the security problems with the Netscape browsers just growing pains?
SCHMIDT: Yeah, there going to be [growing pains] as this technology moves forward.... I'm not
specifically referring to Netscape. But security is a constant battle between the lock pickers and the
lock manufacturers. And the locks are getting better and the lock pickers are getting better. And
you cannot afford to be caught short with a weak lock. But the alternative is to be an island, a
network island. And the US government, the CIA, the people who have designed nuclear bombs
can do that. But the commercial operations and corporations cannot be islands electronically. They
have to have electronic connections and therefore they have to have a security policy.
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