Sun last week shed a little more light on its joint product efforts with America Online. However, a lot of dark shadows remain.
The two companies outlined general product plans yet they glossed over the difficulties of blending overlapping products. Executives promised new electronic commerce services based on these products, but no details. Similarly, no plans were disclosed about future versions of the Netscape browser. Netscape was just acquired by AOL.
Sun and AOL have formed what is in effect a 2,000-person software company, which combines products and engineers from Sun and Netscape. The Alliance will take on both IBM and Microsoft in the burgeoning e-commerce market, according to Mark Tolliver, a Sun executive who now is the Alliance president.
The Alliance selected Netscape's directory, security and management software, and the Netscape Web server, instead of Sun's. Sun will add Java to these products.
The Alliance will also offer Sun and the Netscape groupware products, with at least one more version of each due out later this year. In the meantime, work will go forward to combine the two brands into a single offering by early 2000.
Likewise, the Alliance will sell the Sun and Netscape application servers until early next year, at which time a combined product is due.
The Netscape Navigator browser remains with AOL, which has not been specific about future plans. Previously, AOL described building a browser for the handheld device market. Another idea is to create specialized versions of the browser and integrate it with future e-commerce services on the Netscape Netcenter Web site. For example, a registered business user might log onto Netcenter and click on an icon to buy office supplies. In response, Netcenter opens a new window with a version of Navigator customized for that purchase process.
Details also were sparse about potential new business services that AOL wants to offer. It appears that Netcenter, known as a portal or gateway for accessing Web services and other sites, may become the focal point for these offerings, by allowing business users to develop a custom portal site for their own e-commerce activities. Customers could build sites on top of technology defined by NetCenter. In fact, NetCenter, to a large degree, is a set of HTML documents stored on a Web server, with interfaces to applications and databases. AOL can create, based on Sun-Netscape products, a set of tools that will let customers add new HTML documents and connect to applications and data, either the customer's own, or those from a third party.
Senior Editor Denise Pappalardo contributed to this story.
