LEVY: What have you been doing since leaving Sun? JOY: I got contacted by a bunch of people who had things they thought I might be interested in. It was a little more like having an avalanche of snow hit you off the roof. We [Joy and his longtime colleague Mike Clary] had literally a hundred leads. We realized there was some fractional chance that there would be something in there, but it turned out there wasn’t. A couple of them came close… We talked to Google. We actually were proposing to do some pretty specific things for them, but it kind of actually just fizzled out. They didn’t follow up.
Why aren’t there more start-ups with great ideas? I think it’s punctuated equilibrium, where some change happens and then a burst of creativity leaps out. After the microprocessor, you saw a burst of companies, and then you saw the PC and the burst of companies, and then you saw the Net and a burst of companies. I think people have since been searching for something which would create another burst of innovation.
Your efforts at Jini, which connects devices in a pervasive digital world, and Juxta, a peer-to-peer approach, haven’t taken off. Neither of those things really received the support from Sun I wanted. What happened clearly with Java was that getting it in the Netscape browser gave the thing a tail wind that would give it enough velocity to penetrate, and we just didn’t find a tail wind for Jini and for Juxta. They solved the problem before people recognized they had it, but even now that people have it, they’re not solving it. I guess I’m more a technologist than a business person.
What’s the status of your book on the danger of new technologies? It’s on hold. September 11 changed the need from being a diagnosis book to a prescription book. And so I put it down in hopes of returning to it when I felt like I had an angle on the whole thing that I could carry through to a complete treatment.
