Kim Polese

Marimba burst onto the scene in Fall 1996 with the promise of using Java to push Web content to mass audiences. As push fell out of favor, Marimba and other push vendors shifted their focus to the enterprise, where they hoped to find a need for their services real enough to have dollars behind it –- something the consumer model lacked.

Java pioneer and Marimba co-founder Kim Polese says her vision is nothing less than to make the Internet a seamless utility that delivers information and applications effortlessly to users, like rain falling on the earth. Paul Schindler talks with Polese about Marimba and its prospects. (Recorded Oct. 24, 1997.)

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 Job
President, CEO and Co-Founder, Marimba

College
B.S. in Biophysics from UC Berkeley, graduate work in Computer Science at University of Washington, Seattle

Career
Tech support and consulting services for AI company, Intellicorp. Joined Sun Microsystems in 1989, product manager of C++, object-oriented programming, and developer tools. In 1993, moved to First Person, a Sun subsidiary working to make a product out of the Oak technology, which later became Java. Served as Oak product manager, then Java product manager. Left to form Marimba in January 1996.

First computer
A mainframe at the Lawrence Hall of Science at Berkeley. First personal computer was an Apple II.

First time on the Internet
Used E-mail and FTP as an undergraduate at the UC. "When I first saw Mosaic, my view of the Internet changed fundamentally, as it did for most people who had been using the Internet in a command line way."

Optimistic statement about the Internet
"That it will become invisible, like a utility, like electricity or water. People will stop talking about URLs and downloading, the technologies we are so absorbed with. It will become so central to our lives that it will become invisible."

Pessimistic statement about the Internet
"That it would become so tightly regulated that all the beauty of it would disappear, the ability for people to express themselves freely, to publish their beliefs, poetry, pictures. That it would become so regulated, both from a censorship standpoint and from a distribution of information standpoint."