Sun Co-Founder, Top Scientist Sees Many Webs

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January 11, 2000 (11:54 AM EST)

Sun Co-Founder, Top Scientist Sees Many Webs

Sun Microsystems co-founder and chief scientist Bill Joy has articulated a new view of developing for an increasingly complex Internet comprised of not one, but six, distinct but intertwined Webs.

They each have different focuses, ranging from e-commerce to entertainment to business-to-business, Joy said, speaking this week at Sun Technology Days, a developer-focused seminar in Seattle.

"It has been clear to us since '95 that there wasn't just one Web," Joy said. "Many people still think there is just one Web. There isn't. There are six Webs, and they come from the modality in which the information is used. They are all interconnected."

Clearly, the most familiar, he said, is the Web that is accessed by a browser from a desktop computer, keyboard, and mouse and is used for shopping, e-mail, and browsing.

"The second is clearly more organized for entertainment," he said, citing watching television and interacting with a "Web" connection in a different style. "The entertainment Web is a new opportunity for designing for a pleasant place to be that we really don't have yet."

Joy described the third Web as containing the information that goes to a pocket PC.

"That will have a different kind of information because the screen is smaller," he said. "The thing is always connected to the Net, without a lot of stuff stored locally. It is unrealistic to think you could transfer the code from the existing Web to fit these devices. It is a different kind of information."

The fourth is a network that uses voice recognition to navigate the Web, he said.

"That also is a totally different modality of use," Joy told a standing room-only crowd of developers assembled in a room that seated about 500. "For 20 or 30 years, every computer has had the same modality and that is breaking down."

The first four Webs all "leave the human in the loop," he said. The last two do not.

One is an e-business Web where, for instance, one company's inventory system can talk to another company's inventory without any human interaction.

"It's a much, much higher requirement for correctness and consistency," Joy said.

The sixth Web he spoke of involves embedded systems or "sensors that confederate and work together to do things."

"These are six different Webs that all are enabled by communications and there will be bridges between them, but they'll be different," he said. "It's kind of daunting, but otherwise we'll be trying to force fit in a way that does not make sense. So, we've been trying to get Java technology to all these different Webs."

He also mentioned the social implications of having microprocessors hooked up to the Web everywhere, noting the challenge of designing houses and urban landscapes with lots of different devices that work together "without driving us crazy."

Joy's most recent work at Sun has been on the Jini distributed computing technology for networking computer devices using Java.