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- Too much coffee on the Internet gives software makers the jitters
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- Copyright⌐ 1996 Nando.net
- Copyright⌐ 1996 The Wall Street Journal
-
- (Jun 7, 1996 00:05 a.m. EDT) -- The software industry might have had one too
- many cups of coffee.
-
- It all started last year when Sun Microsystems released Java, a software
- language designed to spice up pages on the Internet's World Wide Web. With
- the boom in the global-computer network, interest in Java has exploded. That
- prompted other companies to release a raft of products designed to add
- features to Java -- many of which carry variations on the coffee theme.
-
- Borland International launched a product called Latte. Symantec announced
- Cafe. Applix makes Espresso. Natural Intelligence has Roaster. Sun also came
- out with HotJava. Last week brought two more entries: Java Beans from Sun,
- and Arabica from International Business Machines. Argus Systems Group makes
- Decaf.
-
- Headline writers at technology trade journals have been having a field day.
- "Sun brews up Java blend," said InfoWorld. "Java technology perks up WWW,"
- said PC Week.
-
- Enough already, says Eric Lundquist, PC Week's editor in chief. "It's
- clearly out of control," he complains, speaking of both the industry's
- coffee-based names and the headline puns, including those in his own
- magazine.
-
- Java itself is a clever name, he says, since "it conveyed the idea of a hot
- product." But all the permutations are starting to wear thin, he believes.
-
- Sun came up with the Java trademark "when a bunch of people got in a room,
- including (Java chief inventor) James Gosling, and started kicking some
- names around," says a Sun spokesman. "What they came to recognize was that
- the one thing that kept them going over the last three or four years was
- coffee."
-
- The staff of developers, many of whom consider themselves coffee
- connoisseurs, often frequented Caffe Verona, a Palo Alto, Calif.,
- coffeehouse.
-
- Java has received so much press that Nestle recently asked Mr. Gosling to
- appear in a Nescafe instant-coffee ad. He turned it down.
-
- Even Sun is getting a bit too much of a caffeine buzz. When it recently
- released its new Java operating system it called it, simply, Java OS,
- passing up the product's code name -- Kona.
-
- "The world didn't need another coffee-related software product," the Sun
- spokesman says.
-
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- Copyright⌐ 1996 Nando.net
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