Yes you're definitely in the ball park with a beer and a hot dog -- there was a huge amount of corporate baggage.

The hype and corporate bullshit that surrounded Java is a good example of what that corporate baggage would have been like if it had been deployed for NeWS's benefit instead of Java's.

If Sun had put as much energy into promoting and supporting NeWS as they did with Java, we would probably live in a very different world today.

Sun turned a corner when they abandoned their Berkeley hippie BSD roots and got into bed with AT&T / SVR4 / Solaris, and that changed a lot of stuff for the worse, making it a lot harder to do things like give away the source code to X11/NeWS. A lot of people from different companies who used to be Sun's enemies, and who had extremely different philosophies and antithetical approaches to "open software", joined Sun and started influencing and managing its policies and projects. A disastrous example was the Distributed Objects Everywhere project and CORBA fiasco, which was originally the crazy idea of a bunch of people from HP and DEC, Sun's former nemesis's, who then came to Sun and started pushing it into everything, to the detriment of NeWS and other older projects at Sun. Some of the problematic people and armchair architectural astronauts that Sun imported and put in charge of DOE/CORBA, like Steve MacKay and Michael Powell, were worthless corporate bullshitters whose main goals were to establish and maintain a hegemony, and they kept their grandiose plans in their head and never wrote anything down or made any hard decisions or came up with anything concrete, because they didn't want to be pinned down to committing to something, when they were actually in way over their heads. The whole point of the incredibly complex software they finally developed was interoperability with other company's compatible software, but in reality none of it actually worked together. It only talked to itself. SLOWLY.

Since DOE was intended to run everywhere and talk to everything but actually didn't, they should have called DOPE for Distributed Objects Practically Everywhere.

DOPE was a complete failure at its stated mission, and it had ridiculously costly overhead and complexity. When they finally delivered something years behind schedule and lacking crucial promised features, it actually required TWO CDROMs to install. (You'd think they could have distributed a distributed network object system over the network, instead of via CDROM, but nooooo: it was just too big to download.) And in the end, nobody actually used "DOE" or "NEO" for anything consequential. They wasted a spectacular amount of time, energy, money, careers, and good will on that crap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere

https://www.javaworld.com/article/2077168/distributed-object...

And then when Java finally came along, the same meddlesome corporate baggage handlers and armchair architectural astronauts went into overdrive to evangelize and promote the Java Juggernaut. And even more of them flocked in droves to Sun to jump on the Java bandwagon. If it was bad after the invasion of System V / AT&T / HP / DEC minions, things got much worse once the Java zombies started arriving in teaming brain-eating hoards to get their part of the action in response to all the hype. The original Java team was brilliant, and there were some extremely excellent people working on it, but they were totally outnumbered by the dead weight of all the hangers-on who didn't want to work hard to make a struggling company great, but just wanted an easy job at a secure company that was already great.

If Sun had shown the commitment and dedicated the resources to NeWS that they did to DOE and Java, things would be a lot different. And it would have probably also turned out terribly, for all the same reasons.

JWZ said the same kind of thing happened at NetScape, too.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/05/03/10/146234/mozilla-foun...

>This is starting to sound familiar (Score:4, Interesting)
by gothzilla ( 676407 ) on Thursday March 10, 2005 @11:10AM (#11899790)

>I remember reading JWZ's blog back in the Netscape days. I remember one entry in particular where he noted that Netscape had changed. It used to be full of people who wanted to help create a great company. It turned into a place full of people who just wanted to work for a great company. The people who live to help create get replaced by those who want to ride on their coat-tails. This happens when businesses become successful. Everything changes. Like the band that was good friends and partied together every night. They get signed, shit gets serious, and suddenly they're fighting and arguing about things till they break up and go their separate ways.

>From an old post in his blog:

>What is most amazing about this is not the event itself, but rather, what it indicates: Netscape has gone from ``hot young world-changing startup'' to Apple levels of unadulterated uselessness in fewer than four years, and with fewer than 3,000 employees.

>But I guess Netscape has always done everything faster and bigger. Including burning out.

>It's too bad it had to end with a whimper instead of a bang. Netscape used to be something wonderful.

>The thing that hurts about this is that I was here when Netscape was just a bunch of creative people working together to make something great. Now it's a faceless corporation like all other faceless corporations, terrified that it might accidentally offend someone. But yes, all big corporations are like that: it's just that I was here to watch this one fall.

>Perhaps the same fate awaits Mozilla. Hopefully not, but when your product becomes as successful as Mozilla and Firefox have, things do change and change is inevitable. It all comes down to how the people involved with the projects handle the change.

>Mozilla did rise from the ashes of Netscape though. Hopefully some of the original Netscape people are still around to help lead Mozilla in the right direction, using their experience from the crashing and burning of Netscape in the late 90's.

>JWZ's rantings can be found at http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/ [jwz.org]

(Just click on the testicle!)

``I have yet to come across so much self-righteous bullshit as when I gaze upon the massive heap of crap that is the jwz web experience.''

-- an anonymous poster to slashdot.org, 1998.

I'm not saying it always has to end in tragedy: C# and TypeScript turned out beautifully, given the constraints they had to deal with, in spite of the fact that they came from a giant corporate behemoth like Microsoft. (Although I'm sure there's a lot of bullshit going on behind the scenes, the trend is to make them more open and community driven.)