Sun, Netscape Map Industry Future Software Companies Combine To Counter Microsoft Clout

A fight to shape the direction of the software industry sharpened Monday when Sun Microsystems Inc. and Netscape Communications Corp. rolled out a new product, hoping it will beat out those upcoming from Microsoft.

The new product, called JavaScript, is designed to let everyday computer users, not just skilled programmers, make software that works easily on electronic networks, particularly the Internet.

Microsoft is due to promote its own software tool for such a purpose on Thursday.

It will likely be months or years before consumers and most businesses benefit. But the companies are now fighting to win the attention and respect of corporate programmers who decide what products become standard.

“The people they’re trying to convince are the developers,” said Jerry Michalski, managing editor of Release 1.0, an industry newsletter.

With the evolution of faster communications lines and new kinds of computer devices, experts believe big opportunities are ahead for software that can be downloaded through a network from a different computer and used when needed.

Sun and Netscape hope to take charge of this opportunity before Microsoft, which has dominated the software industry since its operating program became the standard on IBM personal computers 15 years ago.

Sun earlier this year announced a programming language called Java to write software for network distribution. On Monday, the company revealed a simpler version, JavaScript, was ready for mass market tests.

A test version of JavaScript was made available with the test version of Netscape’s new Navigator program, which people use to navigate the World Wide Web portion of the Internet.

“JavaScript is for someone who is at best an occasional programmer or when you want to do something that is lightweight,” said Eric Schmidt, chief technology officer at Sun.

Mike Homer, vice president of marketing for Netscape, said people who can create a specialized function in spreadsheets or word processors will be able to use JavaScript.

Sun and Netscape also lined up 28 companies to help promote and use JavaScript.

“For the Web to go big time, we need tools that make it easy for not just programming geniuses to create things,” said John McCrea, a manager of Web software at Silicon Graphics Inc., which endorsed the product.

On Thursday, Microsoft is expected to promote its Visual Basic language, now used to make Windows-related programs, for network applications.

Microsoft is also expected to announce several other network-related programs to go on sale next year, including one to use PCs instead of high-powered workstations as the device that serves information on the Web.

Microsoft may get a boost from companies such as Durand Communications Network Inc., a Santa Barbara, Calif. firm that said it has come up with relatively simple way to change existing Windows programs for usage on networks.

Asked about Java during a luncheon Monday in New York, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said he wasn’t worried about the competition.

“Java is there to overthrow what we’ve done,” he said. “We feel very confident the things we’re doing will get out even ahead of the good things that are provided with Java.”

But Sun, Netscape and others advocate the ability to use networkdelivered software on any kind of machine, not just Windows-equipped personal computers.

“Having the market be dominated by one company, stagnated, is what we do not want to have happen to the Web,” said Marc Andreessen, vice president of technology at Netscape.

Sun announced the Java language this spring. Though there are relatively few Java programs now available, it has become closely associated with the Internet.