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Kim Polese

Abstract

Kim Polese (born 1961) was the product manager who took a language called Oak, argued it needed a better name, and launched it as Java on May 23, 1995. Eight months later she and three of Java’s engineers founded Marimba, whose Castanet software “pushed” applications and updates to desktops, and for two years she was the most photographed executive in Silicon Valley: on the cover of magazines, in Time’s 25 most influential Americans of 1997, and in a Fortune article about how a company had marketed its chief executive more than its product. Push collapsed with PointCast; Marimba pivoted to software distribution, went public in April 1999 at a $1.4 billion valuation, and was sold to BMC in 2004 for $239 million. Her later companies sold open-source support. She is in this encyclopedia for Java’s name and for what the coverage of her says about how the industry told its stories in the 1990s.

Kim Polese
Kim Polese in 2006. Image: SpikeSource, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Berkeley

Kimberly Karin Polese was born in Berkeley, California, on November 13, 1961, took a degree in biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1984, and studied computer science at the University of Washington. From 1985 she was at IntelliCorp, the expert-systems company of the first AI boom, and in 1989 she joined Sun Microsystems as a product manager for C++ tools.

Naming Java

In 1993 she became product manager for a language James Gosling’s group had built for set-top boxes and called Oak. The set-top-box business had not materialised, the World Wide Web had, and the group was rewriting the language’s purpose around a browser that could run downloaded code. Polese’s job was to turn a research project into a product, and the first problem was the name: Oak was already a trademark. The renaming session in January 1995 produced a list, Silk, DNA, Ruby, Java among them, and Java won, over the objection of some engineers who thought it silly (see Java Was Named After a Cup of Coffee). Polese ran the launch at SunWorld on May 23, 1995, at which Netscape announced it would build Java into Navigator, and the marketing that followed: the coffee-cup logo, the slogan “write once, run anywhere”, the licensing programme that put the language in every browser within a year. The language’s story is in James Gosling and Java.

Marimba

In January 1996 Polese left Sun with three of Java’s original engineers, Arthur van Hoff, Jonathan Payne and Sami Shaio, and founded Marimba in Palo Alto with Kleiner Perkins money and Polese as chief executive. Its product, Castanet, shipped in October 1996: a “tuner” on the desktop subscribed to “channels” on a server, and the server pushed Java applications and their updates down the channel whenever they changed, so that software could be kept current without anyone installing anything. The idea was that the web had the direction wrong, that content and code should come to the user rather than be fetched, and in 1997 the industry called it push. Wired put it on the cover in March 1997 with the headline “Push!” and the claim that the browser was finished; PointCast, which pushed news to screensavers, was valued at hundreds of millions; Netscape and Microsoft built channel systems into their browsers.

The coverage of Marimba was mostly coverage of Polese. She was 35, articulate, and photogenic, and the press wrote her up as the face of the new economy in a way it wrote up no engineer: magazine covers, Time’s list of the 25 most influential Americans in 1997, profiles that discussed her appearance. In March 1999 Fortune published “The Beauty of Hype”, arguing that Marimba had promoted its chief executive more than its product, that the exposure had brought in customers who did not understand what Castanet did, and that the company’s own engineers resented it. The episode is the clearest example of the period’s habit of turning a technology story into a personality story, and of what that cost the person chosen.

Push, meanwhile, was failing. Pushed content clogged corporate networks, users turned it off, and PointCast collapsed in 1999 (see Dead End: PointCast and Push). Marimba survived because Castanet’s actual customers were IT departments using it to distribute and update software across thousands of PCs, which is what it was good at, and the company repositioned itself as software management. It went public on April 30, 1999, at $20 a share, opened at $59, and closed the day at $60.75, up 203 percent, for a valuation of $1.37 billion on revenue of $13.9 million. Polese handed the chief executive’s job to Fred Gibbons in July 2000 and stayed as chairman; Marimba was sold to BMC Software in 2004 for $239 million and its technology became part of BMC’s client-management line.

Open Source

Her next company was the opposite of Castanet. SpikeSource, founded in 2003 and incubated at Kleiner Perkins, tested and packaged stacks of open-source software so that companies could run them with support, the business model Red Hat had proved (see The Open Source Business Model); Polese was chief executive from 2004 until Black Duck Software bought it in November 2010. She served on President Obama’s innovation advisory board in 2011, co-founded ClearStreet, a financial-wellness start-up, and has chaired CrowdSmart, which uses collective forecasting to evaluate start-ups. The National Center for Women & Information Technology gave her its Innovator Award in 2010, and she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 2014.

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