Lotus Puts its Weight Behind the Java Diet

Lotus president and CEO Jeff Papows has urged the industry not to ignore the opportunity to unify IT behind Java, admitting that the IBM subsidiary will use the applet technology to slim its fat applications.

At the opening day keynote speech at Comdex Spring, Papows admitted that the software packages that have dominated the market since the mid 80s are counter-productive because they have become too big for most customers? uses, despite acknowledging that Lotus has a multi-million dollar business based on those packages.

?I?m not saying the suite market will go away,? Papows said. ?But now there are so many bells and whistles that they put a strain on the network when most of us only need a fraction of the [features in the] application. That?s why we?re including Java applets or components to deal with it later this year. There are big changes on the horizon.?

He pledged Lotus? allegiance to the Java standard endorsed by its parent IBM and said it was a lasting technology which is ?absolutely critical? to the IT industry. He added that the Java standard was not part of the battles between PCs and NCs or Pentium and Risc.

Papows said: ?Java is the renaissance in the applications industry, our chance. If we do screw up this opportunity, in the way we screwed up Unix, we?re going to be enormous losers. You must demand that vendors use the 100 per cent pure Java standard.?

Developers have been hesitant to adopt the pure Java standard, which should allow users to run software on any operating system, because it is too slow. Papows said he met Intel and Apple executives last week and most processor manufacturers are optimising chips to make the Java Virtual Machine perform fast enough.