The Joy of Sun

Category: Most Important Software Developer

Winner: Bill Joy
Chief Scientist, Sun Microsystems

Runner-up: Linus Torvalds
Creator of Linux

To break the ice at a recent launch party for his company's Jini technology, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy fell back on a standby joke: a Top 10 list. The subject: Why Sun lets its chief scientist Bill Joy live in Aspen, Colo. (The company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif.) The No. 1 reason? "Because Bill can live anywhere he wants."

That's no joke. Joy, a cofounder of Sun, helped build one of the world's most powerful operating systems, brought an R&D idea called Java to the front lines of the computing world and masterminded Java's follow-up, Jini, which ambitiously aims to help billions of smart devices communicate with each other in the post-PC world. Perhaps most important for Sun and Chief Agitational Officer McNealy, Joy's work enables the company to fight for a world without Windows.

Joy, 44, cuts an imposing figure with his lanky frame, mad scientist's shock of hair and penchant for buckskin jackets and string ties. He pulls inspiration from an uncommon mix of sources. At a Jini community meeting last month in Aspen, where Joy and a few researchers staff a small lab, Yale University (dossier) political scientist Robert Dahl spoke about the history of democracy. Attendees also chewed on the work of utopian architect Christopher Alexander, whose theories on patterns in language and buildings are incorporated by Joy into software design.

Joy's own ideas have inspired others. His maxim that there are always more smart people outside your company than within is a rallying cry of the open-source movement. His work on Unix during grad studies at UC Berkeley spawned the BSD open-source operating system. His efforts also fueled one of the Valley's biggest capitalist successes: Sun, which began its invasion of the desktop workstation market in 1982, became a billion-dollar company in four years.

For a deep thinker, Joy likes to flex business muscle: He stepped in and handled the first Java licensing deal when Sun desperately needed to prove that Java was more than an R&D toy for Web eye candy.

"We needed an early, defining deal to solidify Java, but had no one to talk to [Netscape] from both the technical and business perspectives," says Mike Clary, an Aspen lab alumnus and now a Sun VP. With Clary as his "English translator," as one Sun staffer put it, Joy went on to cut several more deals with the likes of Oracle (ORCL), Macromedia (MACR) and SGI before handing the reins over to Clary.

Joy will have to keep flexing: Microsoft (MSFT) has its own Windows-based software for a wide range of smart devices and has beaten Sun to the punch in putting it into products.

Joy says he's set up camp in Aspen, rather than Silicon Valley, to keep focused on what's important. "The temptation to go to meetings while others can easily solve problems in your absence, thereby strengthening their skills, is reduced."

Another reason? "Mount Olympus was already booked," explains McNealy's Top 10 list. If Joy can help turn Java and Jini into the glue that connects us all, the pantheon may have to make room. If he doesn't succeed, and Sun can't fend off Microsoft, well, the ski slopes are only minutes away.
- Alex Lash