For Technology Wizard, Innovation Is Worth More Than the Cash It Generates Making It
He’s called “the Edison of Silicon Valley” and “the Other Bill.” In terms of innovations, he arguably trumps Microsoft’s lord and master. So why do so few outside the business and tech worlds know Bill Joy’s name?
For more than two decades, this co-founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems has quietly revolutionized the computer industry. Motivated not by billions of dollars or Time magazine covers, Joy has said many times that it’s the journey--the innovations and challenges of his trade--that goads him on.
He first created a stir in the late 1970s when, as a UC Berkeley graduate student, he tweaked AT&T;’s Unix operating system so mightily that, for the first time in history, computers from different vendors could access and share files with one another.
It was a brilliant innovation--one that cost Joy countless sleepless nights and thousands of strings of computer code. It also was the forebear of the Internet.
Joy hadn’t intended to become a computer science whiz. His career goals changed several times before he entered grad school.
Voted his Michigan high school’s “Most Studious Student,” Joy first aspired to be a mathematician.
But then he chose to major in electrical engineering while at the University of Michigan. By the time he entered UC Berkeley (after being pursued by Caltech and Stanford), he had changed his mind again: He would focus on theoretical computing.
It was Berkeley’s allegedly inferior computer science facilities that pointed Joy on his future course as a technological shaman. What might have derailed other techies--or sent them scampering in protest to administrators--spurred Joy to solve more problems and fix more bugs than he’d ever have had the opportunity to do at the other two grad schools.
“I just ended up getting sucked into practical applications,” Joy said. “At the time I showed up, it needed help. Sometimes things work like that.”
Joy could have earned impressive bucks peddling his Berkeley Unix program to the burgeoning tech community. But generating innovation, not cash, was foremost on his mind.
He sold copies of his program for $50, about what it cost him to duplicate and ship the program, hoping that such “open sourcing”--sharing his work with other developers so they could improve upon it--would hasten the progress of computer science.
In 1982, Joy and three colleagues launched Sun Microsystems. Over the next few years, they churned out technical innovations, including their first workstation with TCP/IP (now known as an Internet protocol suite).
They developed the Network File System (NFS), which allowed computers to share files; in order to spark additional innovation, they charged NFS users no licensing fees. And then they brought network capabilities to the humble PC.
In just six years, Sun’s revenue soared to $1 billion--a record for a Silicon Valley start-up that still holds.
Soon Joy made a fateful decision. He decided to sell most of his Sun stock for a reported $10 million. At the time, it seemed a kingly sum, but it paled against what Joy could have amassed.
One of Sun’s co-founders, Chairman and Chief Executive Scott McNealy, who held onto his shares, is now a billionaire.
Unfazed, Joy continued his techno-wizardry. He designed circuitry for the microprocessors of Sun’s workstations and servers.
He rescued a programming language called “Java” from obscurity by markedly improving on it and making it Internet-friendly. It’s now the language of choice for 1.7 million developers.
He continued to advocate “open network computing” (the utilization of nonproprietary industry standards) and cross-platform technologies so that the computing experience would be improved for the masses, not just for Sun’s clients.
By the early 1990s, Silicon Valley had grown as congested and noisy as the innards of an early workstation. Increasingly, Joy was bogged down with managerial minutiae. All this wasn’t conducive to creating thinking, Joy concluded, so he packed up and moved 750 miles away to a mountainside overlooking Aspen, Colo.
It was a gamble, one that few other top officers of Fortune 500 companies would take. Could Joy maintain his position at Sun so far away from the action? The answer, nearly a decade later, has been yes.
Today, Joy is at a sort of crossroads. This man who has spurred technological progress for nearly 25 years, who has magnanimously shared innovations, now finds himself urging that technical developments be slowed, monitored and restricted.
Joy has peered into the future and finds it dangerous. He has studied technologies such as robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology (the development of microscopic particles with supercomputer-like intelligence) and believes that if they are misused, they will cause catastrophe on a scale hitherto unknown to humankind.
Unlike atomic bombs, this next generation of technology--including killer viruses, out-of-control robots and self-replicating nanobots--may be relatively facile and inexpensive to produce by “rogue users” as means for mass destruction, Joy said.
“Science has to have a stronger moral code,” he said. “Right now people aren’t taking responsibility for the potential consequences of their actions.”
Writing essays, making TV appearances and fielding media questions about this new obsession isn’t easy--or fun--for him. He’d much rather spend time with his two children, ages 4 and 6.
But he’s making the media rounds and even setting down his thoughts in an upcoming book, because he feels this issue couldn’t be more critical. He also believes that his peers, if awakened and challenged, will rise to the occasion and “open source” possible solutions for keeping his envisioned technological apocalypse at bay.
“The important thing now is to begin a good discussion--an honest one,” Joy said. “We need to bring intelligent people together to come up with possibilities for preventing those types of scenarios.”
Meanwhile, Joy is immersing himself in yet another project that greatly excites him: “reliable computing,” or “technology that doesn’t malfunction, hardware that doesn’t fail,” he said. “It’s kind of a daunting task getting people [in computer science] to understand how important this is.”
Watered down, Joy’s computing philosophy amounts to this: Computers should be easy to use. They shouldn’t crash.
It’s dogma that’s passed the lips of millions of computer users, from first-day Web TV owners to rattled system administrators.
And this is Bill Joy’s next quest.
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Bill Joy’s Tips for Techies
* Expect Moore’s Law. The cost of computer power, communications bandwidth and storage capacity will continue to decline dramatically for the foreseeable future. Plan for this, and assume these things will be cheap.
* Design resilient systems. Hardware and software both fail; well-designed systems will allow for this. People make mistakes too--design your systems to resemble the way the real world works by providing users with alternatives so single errors don’t deny them your service.
* Put money into small breakouts. Large successes were small successes initially. Allocate some money to incubation of new small successes; some of these will more than pay for all of them.
* Leave something on the table. It’s tempting in a high-speed, high-tech economy to rush to take every advantage. But your competitor today is likely to be your partner tomorrow. You do better by treating people better and competing fairly; alienating future partners through unethical behavior is more than bad business.
* Consider the consequences. It’s far too easy to look at only the direct effects of our actions, but with technology as powerful as we are creating today, we must all attempt to take full responsibility for all the effects.
