The Java programming language, developed by James Gosling, the Sun Microsystems engineer, in the 1990s as an industry standard to counter the growing influence of Microsoft, has since become a key part of the software foundation for a generation of IT systems .

Sun, though, failed to make much of a business out of Java, even though it is used on hundreds of millions of PCs, mobile phones and other digital gadgets. Licensed cheaply and operated as an open standard, it has become a shared resource for many of the software companies that exist outside the Microsoft camp.