.Net detractors get Sun ONE to love

At the launch of Sun ONE, Scott McNealy, chairman and CEO of Sun, highlighted the rivalry between Sun ONE (open net environment) and .Net - referring to Microsoft's offering as "Not yet .Net". McNealy also promised Sun ONE will provide integratable, not integrated services."

Greg Papadopoulos, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Sun, said Sun ONE is the culmination of three years and billions of dollars in R&D investment by the company. He claimed Sun ONE - building on Enterprise Java Beans and Forte tools - will allow developers to "deliver one copy of software to service millions or billions of users and have the ability to interact with legacy services".

Sun added that Sun ONE is not a new entry of the company into the software business, but rather an extension of its on-going involvement in both software and hardware development.

Ed Zander, president and COO of Sun, said: "We've been in the software business since the 1980s. We've been gearing up for this for several years. We've invested $3bn in software development and have 10,000 people dedicated to software. This is about our core focus of 'create, assemble, deploy' CAD for the Information Age."

by Rod Amis