Center of Gravity
by Dan Ruby
August 2003 Issue
This year's JavaOne conference in San Francisco offered all the learning and networking opportunities that developers have come to expect from the annual gathering of the Java community, but for many of the faithful it may have seemed that something was missing. For one thing, IBM, a former major sponsor of the event and a leader in the Java market, was a no-show. One of its executives was quoted in the press saying that JavaOne used to be "all about Java [but is now] more like a Sun user group."
That comment could be dismissed as a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the change in tone went beyond the absence of any single exhibitor. The fervor and excitement that came from making common cause behind a world-changing technology seemed to be giving way to a loose coupling of commercial interests, suggesting that the event has begun to lose its role as the center of gravity for the Java community. And while the vector of one conference may seem like a minor matter, it reflects a gathering trend in the industry away from a cohesive community of Java developers to a Balkanized market in which companies are building communities around their own product implementations.
Such fragmentation is unfortunate but perhaps inevitable in a competitive market where vendors are motivated to differentiate their otherwise comparable offerings. In such an environment, Sun is tempted to pack the conference with self-promotional content at the expense of community-building initiatives. Keynotes and conference sessions were heavily weighted toward Sun speakers, and several third-party representatives said that they had a more difficult time securing speaking slots this year.
And while Java platform vendors other than IBM maintained their participation in the event, companies such as BEA, Oracle, and Borland are increasingly placing greater emphasis on their own developer programs. Each of these companies has its own developer conference, where they tend to devote their greatest resources and target their most important product announcements. Interestingly, Sun has participated as a major sponsor in the most recent OracleWorld and BEA eWorld, but not in IBM's developerWorks Live.
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