Internet Expo: Lotus’s Papows offers praise for Microsoft and its approach with Java

Boston (08/13/97) — In a move that would have been unthinkable not long ago, Lotus Development Corp. president Jeff Papows used the pulpit during an Internet Expo keynote in Boston to publicly praise Microsoft Corp.’s Internet strategy and urge vendors to set aside their differences and use Java to meld competing object models.

Papows — who said he is meeting with Microsoft chief Bill Gates on Friday (August 15) to discuss this and other issues — called Microsoft “reasonable” in its approach to offer a more granular level of Java and distributed object integration with the Windows platform than other platforms.

Both Microsoft’s Distributed Common Object Model (DCOM), as well as the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) supported by IBM, Netscape, Oracle, Sun, and others will be in play for a long time, so vendors should quit squabbling and define some common ORB semantics in pure Java to promote interoperability, Papows said.

“If we get in our respective fox holes and throw rocks at each other, that’ll lead nowhere,” he said.

Likewise, Papows said vendors should work to create enough proximity in a subset of Microsoft’s Application Foundation Class (AFC) and Internet Foundation Class (IFC) to enable the classes to co-exist at some level.

And users should heed his rallying cry and urge their vendors to cooperate in this area, he said.

“You need to vote with your checkbooks to make it happen,” he told a packed audience of conference attendees.

Some attendees were heartened by Papows’s call for cooperation.

Competition “is probably natural, coming out of the nature of business, [but] I think there’s too much animosity between the players,” said Robert Pellowski, an independent software consultant.

Another attendee welcomed that Papows said large companies are not necessarily as powerful as they may seem to end users.

“It’s very useful to have someone [from a large corporation] say things are not as monolithic as they appear,” said Michael Genovese, an independent marketing consultant. “People need to be reminded that [Lotus and Microsoft] are some of the major players [but] what’s really going on is up to thousands of companies and engineers.”

However, another attendee said that Papows’s call for user input around ensuring Java’s interoperability fit a little too neatly with Lotus’s own interests.

“An IBM or a Lotus wants to have Java out there to make sure that Microsoft doesn’t continue to dominate,” said John Frankenthaler, president of a consulting company based in Needham, MA.

If some attendees were cynical about Papows’s message, another attendee perceived a message of genuine cooperative spirit, and also pointed out that cooperation could create competitive difficulties for the companies.

“I realize it may cause problems for them in terms of differentiating their products,” said Douglas Hunt, an Internet/intranet developer with the Hartford Financial Group in Hartford, CT. “But they’ve got to cooperate [and] if they don’t, we’re going to make them.”

As for dashing off to heed Papows’ call to inform vendors of their desire for Java interoperability, most users agreed with Hunt, who said that his participation would most likely be informal.

“I’m not sure if I will individually do anything in terms of writing an e-mail, but I will certainly talk about it to the people in my business unit,” Hunt said.

In a conversation after the keynote, Papows said he does not see Sun Microsystems’s Remote Method Invocation (RMI) as the means for linking the ORBs, but he did not suggest a different mechanism.

RMI enables Java objects to talk across a network and does roughly the same job as CORBA’s Internet Inter-ORB Protocol or Microsoft’s Distributed Computing Environment.

Papows’s call for unity with Microsoft came two weeks after the companies agreed to bundle Microsoft’s Internet Explorer with Notes 4.6.

Papows said that on Friday he will discuss with Gates more granular levels of integration between Notes 5.0 and Internet Explorer, Dynamic HTML, and NT 5.0.

While Papows held out an olive branch to Microsoft, he reconfirmed that no such branch will be extended to Netscape unless it unbundles its Navigator browser from its Communicator Web client suite, which has groupware features that compete with Notes.

“The ball is in their court,” he said, adding that there is less “acidity” in the Netscape/Lotus relationship now than in past weeks.

If Netscape chooses to unbundle Navigator, then Lotus will consider bundling and integration agreements akin to the Microsoft agreement, he said.

Lotus, based in Cambridge, MA, can be reached at (617) 577-8500, or on the Web at https://www.lotus.com.