The Opportune Lobbyist

Hewlett-Packard's (HP) announcement of a

new brand of Java Internet programming language for embedded processors certainly has lead

to a plenty of speculation around Silicon Valley that the move shows the Palo Alto

company's willingness to do just about anything to please its new strategic partners,

Intel and Microsoft.

HP's Java move couldn't have been more

blatantly obvious in showing the Palo Alto company willing to do Microsoft's dirty work in

trying to splinter the Java community in the one area where Java has its best chance for

success in combating Microsoft-embedded processor systems.

Of course, from a business point of view,

it can all be easily justified. HP has committed its workstation and server future to

Microsoft's Windows NT OS and the Merced processor HP helped develop with the other half

of the Wintel dynamic dynamo. It's only natural for the company to do a few favors for

Seattle-based software company which will need to develop NT upgrades that should live up

to HP's future expectations.

Microsoft, with antitrust investigators

breathing down its neck, is effectively prevented from making any kind of aggressive move

against Java, such as developing its own embedded Java virtual machine to compete with Sun

rather than adopting Sun's embedded Java solution.

Enter HP



By getting HP to develop and market a similar embedded processor Java engine, Microsoft
effectively killed several birds with a single stone, not the least of which is confusing

the legal issues in Sun's ability to stop Microsoft from developing Java extensions. Now

there are two companies with proprietary Java solutions, and Microsoft can only hope HP is

opening the door for others to follow suit.

Microsoft's immediate and enthusiastic

endorsement of the HP Java software and its promise to put it into Windows CE, speaks

volume about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that caused HP to become a pawn in

Microsoft domination game plan.

Another indication of HP's complicity in

the anti-Java move was the company's half-baked excuses to justify breaking away from the

Java alliance such as the superficial concerns over development costs and fears that

proprietary HP printer technology could fall into the hands of printer competitors?

No doubt HP, till recently a strong

supporter of Java and its write-once-run-anywhere universal software portability, could

have easily powered its printers and other devices with Sun's Java virtual machine. But

unlike NT-based servers, Java represents few, if any, future revenues for HP.

To see a company like HP having to execute

Bill Gates' anti-Java tactics, is just one more vivid reminder of what a monopoly can, and

will do, to companies who are desperately dependent upon a single supplier for a key

component for their products.