Regardless of the course Sun takes with Jini, there's no time to lose.

New generations of Internet-connected cell phones, handheld devices, TV sets and cars are on the way. Also looming are competing ways of networking gadgets: Microsoft's Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), IBM's T-Spaces or the Salutation software backed by Canon, Xerox, Matsushita, Hewlett-Packard and others.

UPnP has a distribution channel that's the envy of the industry: the Microsoft Windows CD. UPnP will ship with Windows Millennium Edition, the sequel to Windows 98 due in the second half of the year, and UPnP devices will begin arriving toward the end of the year, spokesman Shawn Stanford said. T-Spaces is shipping in two IBM products and soon will ship in 15 products from other companies.

Microsoft argues that one UPnP advantage is that it uses standard Internet communications methods instead of requiring use of Sun-controlled software. Sun counters that UPnP, for all its purported independence from PCs, is still designed to further a Microsoft-centric world.

Technologically, UPnP is months behind Jini, said Alvin Chin, a technology evaluator for Canadian consultancy CGI, but Sun can't be complacent. "They can't wait for Microsoft to come and catch up," he said.

Some manufacturers are hedging bets. Siemens demonstrated a Jini dishwasher but has joined the UPnP steering committee. And Echelon, a company working on technology to connect devices in the home, at work or on factory floors, supports Jini and UPnP.

Analysts expect Jini devices to begin arriving this year. Sun acknowledges that the gadgets didn't arrive as fast as hoped but argues that it's been successful as a technology to connect software modules together.

"The devices side is happening, but it's taking a little bit longer," Sasaki said. "On the services side, it's faster than we ever predicted."

This two-pronged strategy is embodied in PersonalGenie, a 22-person start-up based in Tucson, Ariz., that's using Jini to help computers and electronics automatically respond to a person's preferences.

By June, PersonalGenie will launch a software-only service that uses Jini to assemble custom Web portals based on an abstract "digital portrait" of a person's interests and personality. Later, when Jini devices become available, the company will offer services to let homes automatically cater to a person's preferences, such as temperature.

"We're trying to reduce the number of interactions the consumer has to have with the system by increasing the intelligence of the system," chief executive Sylvia Tidwell Scheuring said.

In the meantime, the clock is ticking.

"It's clearly not lived up to the expectations that Sun had set. According to their initial plans, we should be floating in Jini devices by now," Gartner Group analyst David Smith said. "They do need to combat the perception that Jini is missing in action."  

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