The Edison of the Internet
Sun Microsystems mastermind Bill Joy is on a 20-year streak of innovation that has laid the groundwork for a new technological era--one in which businesses will farm out the hassles of owning computers and people will be more wired than ever. No wonder he's considered the smartest man in Silicon Valley.
by Brent Schlender
It's a vintage Bill Joy moment. Here he is, co-founder and chief
propeller-head of computer powerhouse Sun Microsystems, down on his hands and knees, fiddling with the audio and video gear that drives his home theater system. Having just spotted the twister bearing down on her Kansas farm, a stricken-looking Dorothy, Toto in her arms, stands paralyzed in freeze-frame on the projection-TV screen.
"Daddy, just let Dorothy play!" pleads his toddler daughter, a Wizard of Oz junkie.
Joy, who pauses to give little Maddie a quick tickle, has something else in mind, namely a demo. He's trying to show a visitor how a certain scene in the DVD version of the movie classic looks so much sharper than the same sequence on laserdisk that it actually reveals a subtle technical flaw in the projection TV itself. (Don't ask why. It's a geek thing.)
The only problem is, Joy owns so many different kinds of video players that he has to swap cables manually before he can show these video snippets back to back. "This is precisely why we invented Jini," he grumbles, referring to the radically new computer networking technology he developed for Sun. "My home entertainment system should be a network of components that just works. I shouldn't have to be a rocket scientist."
Which is, of course, just about what Bill Joy is. In fact, many consider him the smartest guy in Silicon Valley, this despite the inconvenient detail that he lives 750 miles away on a mountainside overlooking Aspen, Colo. You may never have heard of him, but mention his name to a programmer and you'll get a knowing nod: This towering, tousle-haired software wizard runs a close No. 2 to Microsoft's Bill Gates as the most influential person in the computer industry. As unassuming as Gates is rich, Joy, 44, has earned his reputation not by dominating markets or amassing tens of billions of dollars, but by dint of a remarkable 20-year record of invention born of late-night
programming epiphanies, way-outside-the-box thinking, and uncanny technological clairvoyance.
Here's the short list of why he's a legend among computer cognoscenti. As a graduate student in the late '70s, Joy almost single-handedly shaped AT&T's Unix into a versatile, industrial-strength computer operating system, one that today is the chief competitor to
Microsoft's heavy-duty Windows NT in corporate America. Just as
important, Joy gave Unix the networking underpinnings that would ultimately foster the emergence of the Internet. Or how about this: While most programmers have only a rough idea how computer chips work, it was Joy, and not some chip architect, who designed the most crucial circuits in Sun's SPARC microprocessors, which are the brains of its entire $10-billion-a-year line of workstations and servers. Then there's Java. Five years ago he spotted the potential of an obscure but inspired programming language in Sun's labs and masterminded its transformation into a software lingua franca that has attracted a million practitioners, brought razzmatazz to the World Wide Web, and thrown a monkey wrench into Microsoft's plans for Internet dominance. We'll get back later to his newest brainchild, Jini.
Joy's accomplishments not only have rocketed Sun into the front ranks of a legendarily competitive industry but also have amplified the explosion of the Internet, both as a communications medium and as a social and business phenomenon. Indeed, of the "ten tech trends to bet on" enumerated in the preceding story, fully half bear the unmistakable fingerprints of computerdom's "other Bill." Says David Gelernter, a Yale computer scientist who is himself world renowned: "Joy is certainly one of the most influential people in the modern history of computing. He's a sharp merchant of ideas, and he's a deep thinker." Joy's boss, Sun CEO Scott McNealy, who admittedly is a mite biased, puts it another way: "AT&T has Bell Labs, and we have Bill Joy. We get a lot more for our money."
Aspen Smallworks is the name Joy gave his aerie in downtown Aspen, three blocks from the ski lifts (he complains he doesn't get enough time on the slopes). There he and a handful of Sun associates "incubate" their creations far from
Silicon Valley distractions such as traffic jams, back-to-back meetings, and McNealy. Says Joy:"I moved out here in 1991 because back in Palo Alto, when my office was next to Scott's, I couldn't even think. Every ten minutes he'd bother me with another one of his crazy ideas."
Most of the crazy ideas come from Joy, actually. Get him riffing on network "architectures" and he turns into a motormouth in a vain attempt to keep up with his racing brain, which finds revealing parallels to his work in just about everything he hears, sees, or reads. A man of prodigiously broad interests, he can talk knowledgeably about Meso-American art or cattle ranching or photography or stock market "quant" theories. During a discussion of high-tech corporate cultures, for example, he dances deftly among references to Jungian psychology, the plays of Eugene O'Neill, and the writings of G.I. Gurdjieff to make a startling point. The best companies, he contends, have a wild side they can draw on in times of competitive stress--employees free to pursue creative tangents. "Some companies are just too well planned," he says. "I don't expect any great innovation to come out of Compaq or Dell, for example. They're in a business where every little bit matters. They have to plan down to the penny, so they don't have a wild side. But what will they do when the technology takes an unexpected turn?"
While he swims with the geeks, Joy is shrewd; he's forever finding worldly, even humanistic, ways to solve knotty problems of computer and network design, and spotting business opportunities where others just see technical barriers. "Bill Joy's point of view is so important because he is one of the few who can really see the big picture and yet understand all the nuances," says John Seely Brown, director of Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center. And the delectable irony is that this postmodern polymath treasures one virtue above all others: simplicity.
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