Bill Joy is a god in the world of Unix wonks. In the early days of the Internet, his tireless work as the principal designer for the open-source Berkeley Unix while a graduate student in 1975 gained him recognition among coders and engineers around the world. Seven years later, he leveraged that Unix expertise to help found Sun Microsystems. Mr. Joy is both an early pioneer of the Internet age and one who steadfastly believes that all computing should be open and accessible. Currently the chief scientist at Sun Microsystems in Palo Alto, California, he is widely known for his contributions to the success of the Java programming language.
Bill Joy has been an exuberant supporter of Java for many years. His enthusiasm surfaced during the Microsoft antitrust trial; in 1995 he had written an email that said, "Java gives Sun a chance to break away from the Microsoft monopoly." Other Sun engineers disagreed with Mr. Joy's bold assertion, but it does say something about his unrelenting confidence in Java. Mr. Joy is at his captivating best when he spins his imagination and reveals what he sees for the future of handheld computing devices.
We've all heard about handhelds being the next wave in the information revolution. What form will they take?The most important thing is that the devices be networked. They are much more useful when they are connected continuously. The Internet that most people use today is connected; our connection is on all of the time. The devices that you carry around with you should also be aware of your context. There is no reason why my pocket device couldn't pay for a cup of coffee and a muffin in an electronic exchange with a cash register. And there is no reason why my pocket device couldn't also find out from the city it is in where the traffic jams are. The city knows in some sense. All of this stuff is happening with next-generation wireless.
What are people going to be doing with these handheld devices?Let's say you go into a hotel room and you pull a thing out of your pocket and it opens the door. When it gets near the door it displays a menu of choices. When you go in your room, the menu of choices on the screen lets you choose to listen to jazz music. You won't have to find a stereo and select a disc. The devices will be oriented to what you want to do and the results that you want.
What about standards and their role in this next generation of handheld wireless devices?The United States has made a hash of the wireless networks by having too many different, incompatible ones. Some competition is good. Too much competition is frustrating if the network is bad.
What's the way out of that?Probably to go to a single, seamless CDMA network. Of course, people would say that we need to have competition to tell us which network is technically the best. But in fact, the one that is technically the best doesn't necessarily mean that it will be the one that's going to win. So we end up with a worse network than if we had just picked one. I think technically everyone recognizes that CDMA, among the standards that are alternatives at this point, is the best. Obviously, people have invested a lot of capital into other networks in the United States. But the TDMA networks are inferior, and technically they just don't support wireless data as well.
Why is it so important to have this single, seamless network?Having a really solid digital wireless network will be as important as having a phone system was in the last century.
Where does the Web fit into this new handheld revolution?We have one Web that we've built that goes to desktop computers. And this one is quite popular. It is quite clear, however, that we're going to have a different Web that goes to handsets. Some people have come to an agreement on what the markup language for that will be. We will have an industry standard in the sense that all of the manufacturers agree.
Do you think wireless smart phones will make inroads here like they have in Europe?The key is going to be to get enough phones so that people will start making Web sites. One of the reasons that the Palm VII has relatively few things that work on it is that there aren't that many of them. There isn't a big economic incentive. But if the sites can work across all of the physical networks, that helps enormously. I love my little two-way Motorola text pager, but I was in Honolulu and it didn't work there. You'd think that Honolulu would be enough of a major city that it would work. And my CDMA cell phone doesn't work in my hometown in Aspen, Colorado. Neither does the Palm VII. You begin to see the fragmentation of this thing.
You seem to have a personal fascination with handheld devices. How do you envision using them in the future?It would be nice to have a piece of electronic paper so I could read the newspaper. Maybe it would be one that would fold and unfold like a trifold. I have a trifold wallet. Maybe I could have a trifold piece of paper that I could stick in my pocket, unfold, and lay flat to be a newspaper. That doesn't seem impossible. It wouldn't be a computer; it would just be a display, and probably wouldn't take that much power at all, so batteries would last a long time. What you really want to do is break up the phone into basically the radio and put it into your shoes to get the electromagnetic radiation as far from your head as possible. And maybe put something in your shoes so that when you walk the pressure will generate electricity and recharge your battery. I don't know, I'm not that kind of engineer. You could even have microphones built into your clothing that you could talk into and have perfect voice pickup. That will all happen in the next ten years. Moore's Law has driven the performance of the chip so that all of these crazy things will get tried.
You were quoted in the New York Times as saying that we need to create a Silicon Continent, not just a Silicon Valley. How does this relate to issues in the handheld revolution?My view is that education is the enabler. Anywhere there is a great university there can be an economy of companies. And it's wrong to focus on access to computers. What we really need to focus on is education. Make sure that everyone gets an education and try to raise its quality, and the rest will take care of itself. The reason you see things like Bangalore [India's high-tech center] and other developments and wealth being created in India is because of the universities there.
What needs to happen for the networks to improve?We have been working really hard at getting Java into all of these networked devices so that they can be programmed in a nice, quality language that encourages quality software.
What will it take to be a leader in this revolution?As these things collide, you have Nokia, Palm, and Handspring (Proposed: Nasdaq: HAND). Basically, the keys will be the personal digital assistant and traditional paging devices. Any company involved in those could come up with the hit product for the next generation. If it is a hit, the company is going to have to find a way to manufacture it in sufficient volume. And the real problem is the company is going to need the network to back it up. The Palm VII is a pretty nice device, but the network is painfully slow and the coverage isn't complete, so it's frustrating.
Do you lose any sleep over this stuff at night?I'm really patient, so I don't lose sleep about this stuff. It is frustrating that the networks are such a mess, but there's not much we can do about it.