Java consolidation not a new trend

Consolidation in the Java tools market already happened quite some time ago, said analyst Michael Cote of RedMonk. "Essentially, you have Eclipse, NetBeans and Visual Studio, and the JetBrains people," he said, noting that many commercial tools now are based on Eclipse.

The rise of open source Java tools -- notably Eclipse -- in fact promoted the consolidation of the Java tools market, Cote said, spurring Borland's decision to exit the tools market and form CodeGear as a subsidiary before finally selling it off. The Eclipse platform and its free tooling became such a potent force that companies such as BEA began to base their own tooling on it, rather than invest in proprietary ones, he said.

The acquisitions of BEA and CodeGear, Roth said, were "necessary outcomes of a shrinking market." The Java tools market is shrinking in terms of dollars "because there's so many free good free options out there for most of the kinds of simple Java development that people need," he said. Workshop was priced at US$999 with plug-ins, he said. By contrast, Eclipse and Sun's NetBeans products are free. "It's really hard to compete with free," he said.

But Eclipse executive director Mike Milinkovich said he does not believe Eclipse has reduced the Java tools market's size, though he agrees that it has reduced the total number of tools. "More and more companies are collaborating on the evolution of the Eclipse platform and then using that platform in their products," he said.

For Sun, app dev is now a loss leader

The economics of free caused Sun to rethink its whole approach to Java app dev tools. Last year, it merged its formerly commercial Sun Java Studio Creator and Sun Java Studio Enterprise tools into the free NetBeans. The reason: Sun saw the tools market no longer made sense as a business if the goal was to make money from selling software licenses to developers.

So now Sun sees the tools as a way to encourage the use of Sun's other revenue-generating services and platforms, such as application servers, said Kuldip Oberoi, group manager for developer tools marketing. "Developer tools become an enablement" to monetizing the application server, he said.