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Technology Stocks : BORL: Time to BUY! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Al Shelinsky who wrote (9224)	2/27/1998 9:47:00 AM
From: Bipin Prasad	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10836

Lawsuit Heightens Java Awareness, Study Says (02/26/98; 7:22 p.m. EST) By Andy Patrizio, TechWeb The lawsuit between Microsoft and Sun over Java, which begins on Friday, may prove to be the programming language's best advertisement, according to an International Data Corp. (IDC) study. The squabble between the two companies over Sun's claim that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0 isn't compliant with Sun's Java Development Kit (JDK) has heightened public awareness about Java, said the study, called Java Adoption Jumps. IDC conducted the survey of 800 companies in various industries during October and November, soon after Sun filed suit against Microsoft. The results were released Thursday. The study found that less than 30 percent of corporate application developers were worried about the lawsuit. "If you only want to build for Windows and you like Java, you'll probably buy Microsoft's product," said Evan Quinn, an analyst with IDC in Mountain View, Calif. "If you have any doubt about where you would deploy, you buy one or the other product," Quinn added. "The suit did nothing but make those lines of division even deeper." More than 45 percent of the companies surveyed had adopted Java in some fashion, up from 35 percent just a quarter before. But the biggest surprise is how much interest in Java has grown among small and medium-size companies, said Quinn. In the last three months, 15 percent were planning to evaluate Java's potential. Although none of the major Java vendors have been aggressively marketing their products to small and mid-size companies, the message is getting through, said Quinn. "With all the stuff in the press, like the Sun-Microsoft suit, [Java] has grabbed their attention." However, Java is far from being widely accepted, the study found. Most companies surveyed don't plan to move from pilot programs to real investments in Java until mid-1999, which means vendors are going to have to keep up the momentum for at least that long. Like Visual Basic and PowerBuilder, which both took several years to become mainstream, Java won't begin selling itself for another couple of years. In a report IDC will release next month, the research firm found Java is being adopted most rapidly in the education market, where users are more willing to embrace new technology. Business and legal services, health care, and telecommunications are also strong supporters of Java, while the weakest areas of Java support are wholesalers and commercial and retail bankers. Sun subsidiary JavaSoft must continue its evangelizing efforts, Quinn said. "They need to be disciplined in the platform and in their decisions," he said. "JDK 1.1 would be better off delayed and tested longer."