Pied Piper of Technology
When the 75-year-old retired Michigan schoolteacher couldn’t get his iMac computer to print properly, he called Bill Joy Jr.
Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and one of the world’s most influential computer engineers, soon learned that what the neophyte user--his father--lacked was a common vocabulary for the words and symbols on his screen.
“I spent an hour just doing a tour of the screen, giving everything a name,” said Joy, who is Sun’s chief scientist. “These devices are too complex.”
If helping his father was frustrating for Joy, the experience reaffirmed his commitment to make computing easier for the rest of the world. In the end, he may do more to change the technology governing the way people live and work than anyone else alive today, including that man named Bill in Redmond, Wash.
Joy’s mission is to make computing hardware and software that is virtually invisible to the user. And he has a rare combination of tools to get there--including freedom, breadth and depth of thought, a willingness to hammer out compromises, and the resources of a still-nimble company worth more than $100 billion.
Most people have never heard of Joy, who turned 45 last month. But his standing within the high-tech world, and Palo Alto-based Sun’s position as an alternative to the Intel-Microsoft duopoly, allows Sun to rally hundreds of other companies behind its evolving technological vision of the future.
“The stuff he does has an enormous impact,” said Marc Andreessen, who led the invention of the Web browser and co-founded Netscape. “Bill’s the only person I know who can simultaneously design a microprocessor, write the code for a new operating system, and invent a new computer language.”
Joy’s biggest accomplishment is Java, the programming language he helped fashion, then championed. More than a million software developers are registered to write Java programs, and most interactive Web sites use the language.
That’s because Joy and others designed it to be the first programming language capable of running, without rewriting, on any operating system. Java weakened Microsoft’s Windows stranglehold and saved programmers untold years’ worth of duplicated work time.
Joy also co-designed the microprocessors that allow Sun to stay independent of Intel chips.
And Jini, which Joy outlined on a place mat in an Aspen restaurant two years ago, is a technology designed to allow home electronics to communicate with one another. A digital camera, for example, will automatically upload images to a printer that would then output pictures without a single button being pressed.
The first products to incorporate Jini are expected to be announced next month. Joy, meanwhile, has already moved on to another undisclosed software project.
While raw intelligence and Sun’s Fortune 500 power are important, Joy’s secret weapon may be that he has not lost his capacity for outrage at computers that crash for no reason. After the iMac incident, Joy gave his father the e-mail address of Apple Computer interim Chief Executive Steve Jobs and told him to gripe away.
Joy’s empathy for everyday people--for those without his multiple T-1 high-speed Internet lines--might be enhanced by his refusal to live like the stereotypical no-life Silicon Valley engineer.
Overwhelmed by the endless traffic jams in the valley and the endless meetings at Sun, Joy decided 10 years ago to move to someplace fun, where he could think in peace.
He methodically researched Western ski towns with low precipitation, small populations and good bookstores. He chose Aspen. Here he opened a two-story, unmarked office dubbed Aspen Smallworks.
“Bill can live anywhere he wants,” said Sun CEO Scott McNealy.
Voracious Reader at Tender Age of 3
A tousle-haired Shakespeare fanatic who consumes as many as a dozen books on an extreme range of topics daily, Joy still browses in the local bookstore, even after becoming Amazon.com’s second-largest individual customer.
His voracious reading habit began at age 3. A math prodigy as well, Joy skipped grades, graduating from high school in Farmington, Mich., at 15. He fell in love with computers at the University of Michigan, where he picked up a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering in 1975.
At UC Berkeley, Joy came to prominence as a graduate student, leading a team that rewrote Unix, an operating system for large computers developed at AT&T.;
“He used to stay up all night writing code,” said Eric Schmidt, a friend from graduate school who is now chief executive of Novell. “The rest of us wrote a little, but he basically wrote all of it. He wrote millions of lines.”
Berkeley Unix, as Joy’s version was known, became the most popular of the rapidly fragmenting family of computer languages.
It also gave Joy a reputation. In 1982, hardware engineer Andy Bechtolsheim, Stanford MBA McNealy and engineer/entrepreneur Vinod Khosla sought Joy out and made him the fourth founder of Sun.
A visionary, Joy saw that computing would be networked to allow the maximum distribution of computing power to the most people. He was the first to put Internet protocol on a workstation.
That paved the way for Sun’s later role as a Net leader. The company now supplies many of the servers that power the biggest Internet sites, a position that has helped Sun’s stock more than quadruple in value over the last 12 months. On Friday Sun’s stock closed at $75.13 per share, up 19 cents.
Joy fought for Sun’s version as a dozen companies struggled over control of Unix development. As the industry divided into two main camps, confusion grew among software writers and workstation buyers.
Microsoft’s Windows NT, another network-oriented operating system, took advantage and gained ground, eventually passing Unix workstations in unit sales last year.
A Lesson in Industry Politics
The experience drove home two key lessons for Joy.
First, that Microsoft was Sun’s enemy, a producer of buggy code that could win in the market anyway. Second, that fragmentation in the face of an enemy so powerful would kill whatever Sun did.
As a result, Joy now devotes a prodigious amount of time to industry politics, painstakingly building consensus company by company in order to avoid another Unix-style diaspora.
“He’s smart enough to know that he will succeed only if people are out there beating the drums, and that’s part of what his job is,” said analyst Linley Gwennap of Cahners MicroDesign Resources, which tracks microprocessor development.
Joy wrote the specifications for Java, first introduced as a programming language in 1995. Since then, his Java effort has been as much about evangelism as about making applications written in the language run better and faster.
“Java was about building something where it would be nice if everyone cooperated,” Joy said. Intel Chairman Andy Grove “says only the paranoid survive. We’re trying to be the anti-paranoid people.”
Joy played a major role in the talks that resulted in Netscape using Java in its Web browser. It was intense, unglamorous work.
The payoff came when Microsoft was forced to follow Netscape by enabling Java in its own browser, spreading Java throughout cyberspace. “That was when we really got wired,” Sun Vice President Mike Clary said.
The ability to get other engineers to follow him, even those from rival companies, stems partly from Joy’s philosophical respect for others and their ideas.
“If, looking back on your life, some huge idea has made a difference, you are probably going to have found out about it from someone else,” Joy said.
While they will listen to anyone, Joy and Sun still want to keep control of Java’s development. This month, Sun abandoned its long-standing promise to put an international standards body in charge of the technology.
Joy’s openness and respect for others’ ideals extends beyond technology. When he accompanied Novell’s Schmidt on a car-buying trip, he insisted that Schmidt not purchase the car he knew he wanted until after a test drive.
When Schmidt asked why, Joy responded: “The car salesman needs to drive us around to feel good about selling the car. Otherwise, he won’t feel that it was really his doing.”
“It never occurred to me to think about the car salesman’s feelings,” Schmidt said. “This is a Bill Joy principle.”
Concern for others also helped lead to Joy’s next great effort, Jini. Joy envisioned Jini a few years ago while reading French philosopher-politician Jacques Attali’s 1990 book “Millennium,” which predicts a society of modern nomads communicating effortlessly via small machines.
“Everyone was talking about Windows NT and how Microsoft would own everything,” recalled Sun co-founder Khosla, now a top venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. “Bill Joy was envisioning the next step in functionality.”
Joy started by hashing Jini out with Clary.
“He’d throw off 10 ideas, and I’d pick up one and ‘increase the circle of conversation’ about it,” Clary said, using a Joyism. If that one piece still didn’t gel, the men would refine it.
“The biggest difference between Bill and other sorts of visionary engineers is his ability to describe the technology in a way that can be understood by the upper management,” current Jini leader Jim Waldo said.
With Jini, Joy and Clary went to McNealy to ask for development money and a team that could work in secret, without the bureaucracy that crushes many new technologies. McNealy agreed and added his own twist, hiding money for the project inside the budget of Sun’s human resources department.
“People in human resources kept sending me e-mail saying, ‘What does your group do?’ ” Clary recalled.
More Battles May Lie Ahead
Not everyone sees things evolving the same way Joy does, and battles like those over control of Java’s development are likely.
Microsoft’s Universal Plug and Play technology, for one, is in competition with Jini.
Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie runs that company’s intelligent appliance efforts and said Jini’s problem is that “it posits a more homogenous environment,” one in which devices with Jini can’t communicate with non-Jini devices.
Internet pioneer and UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock agrees with Mundie that intercommunication among devices will be centered on the interlocking network, not in the devices themselves.
If the Jini concept of electronically talking toasters sounds far-fetched, it is more likely to come to fruition because of the weight of Joy’s earned authority, which convinces the Sonys and Philips Electronics of the world to follow him.
“He uses Sun as a slingshot to get the whole industry to work on a problem,” said John Doerr, one of Joy’s best friends, sometime Aspen resident and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Doerr was an early Sun investor, and his wife introduced Joy to the ceramic artist he later married. He has also helped make Joy rich: Joy sold most of his Sun shares long ago, but did invest in Doerr’s phenomenally successful venture funds.
Although Joy is a multimillionaire, he doesn’t appear to think much about money.
On the September day that Foundry Networks Inc. went public and multiplied in value a near-record six times, Joy’s broker called with the good news. Joy, who had accepted the broker’s suggestion to buy shares at the initial price, was happy to hear about the run-up. But he was more delighted at guessing Foundry’s stock-trading symbol, FDRY, on the first try, which allowed him to save several seconds when he looked up the price.
“I would not describe Bill’s interest in the power of ideas as commercial,” Doerr said.
Instead, plaques commemorating Joy’s patents lie on the floor at Smallworks, while Joy thinks about ways to make the future easier for his children, now 3 and 6 years old. Maybe that’s why, when engineers at other companies get to choose who to follow, they offer an ode to Joy.
