Sun, Microsoft Suit Ended Long Ago For IT

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January 24, 2001 (4:33 PM EST)

Although the long-running lawsuit between Sun Microsystems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. ended Tuesday, industry observers said the legal wrangling hasn't affected IT for quite some time.

The bitter rivals settled their 3-year-old legal battle over Sun's Java technology, with Microsoft (stock: MSFT) agreeing to pay $20 million to Sun (stock: SUNW) and terminating its Java license.

But analysts and users said the market has long determined Java's place in the high-tech industry without Microsoft, which had suspended development shortly after Sun filed its federal lawsuit in October 1997.

"In some ways, this thing has sort of outdated itself," Tracy Corbo, analyst for the Hurwitz Group, Framingham, Mass., said. "It's almost like it doesn't apply at this point."

Tim Ferrell, IT director for McGee Corp., Matthews, N.C., said Microsoft lost the interest of Java developers after the company stopped upgrading its Visual J++ development tool.

"Ever since the lawsuit began, Microsoft quit doing anything with Java," Ferrell said. "The one product they had, Visual J++, hasn't been updated in two years, so it wasn't even a viable option [for developers]."

Sun, Palo Alto, Calif., sued after Microsoft, Redmond, Wash., added extensions to Java that made the language run faster on Windows, but broke the technology's ability to run on other platforms.

Sun accused Microsoft of trying to fragment Java into incompatible versions and derail Sun's efforts to maintain consistency in the technology.

Although the lawsuit never went to trial, it was cited extensively by U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in his finding that Microsoft was a predatory monopolist. Jackson ordered Microsoft's breakup, and the case is under appeal.

Since the Sun lawsuit, Java has moved from its original focus on the desktop computer, where it met with limited success due to performance problems, to large-scale computer servers. Java is widely used today in building and deploying Web-based applications.

Microsoft has developed a Java-like language called C# and has embarked on a new strategy for Web-based development on the Windows platform, called Microsoft.Net.

The bitterness between the two companies has often surfaced publicly, with Sun chief executive Scott McNealy referring to the Windows operating system as a "big hair ball," and encouraging the government in its antitrust prosecution of Microsoft.

In response, Microsoft president Steve Ballmer has accused Sun of whining and has belittled Sun's attempt to direct the future of computing away from the desktop PC.

Under the settlement with Sun, Microsoft will be allowed to use an older, Sun-compatible version of Java for seven years in its current Java products.

Microsoft admitted no wrongdoing, and Sun reserves the right to bring antitrust claims against Microsoft, even for actions covered in the original suit.

It is the second time within a year that Microsoft has settled a major lawsuit against it from a competitor. Microsoft and Caldera Systems Inc. (stock: CALD) reached a surprise out-of-court settlement just weeks before Caldera's private antitrust lawsuit was scheduled to go to a jury.

In another out-of-court settlement in December, Microsoft paid $97 million to some 12,000 temporary workers to end a case in which long-term temporary employees alleged they were treated as full-time employees in every way except for compensation.