But his talk of small programs and handheld consumer appliances seemed irrelevant to the company. He cited the Moore's Law trends as grounds for granting the first five years of the 1990s to Bill Gates. Indeed, in the late 1980s, Joy had personally made a separate peace with Microsoft by selling a large portion of his Sun holdings and buying Microsoft shares, thus becoming the second richest of Sun's four founders. But then, around 1995, predicted Joy, everything would change. The key to software innovation, he said, was smart programmers.
Smart programmers are hundreds of times more productive than ordinary programmers.
You need a strategy that allows for innovation occurring elsewhere. To the Justice Department, Microsoft's overwhelming OS market share and its teeming armies of programmers seem a barrier to entry for other software competitors. To Joy, Microsoft's size and dominance could become a barrier to entry for Microsoft, blocking it from the key new markets of the late 1990s. It is now clear that Joy was on target. The breakthrough is here in force, invading and occupying all the commanding heights of the information economy, from the media to the universities.