:: Another Look :: Finjan ::

Remember Finjan?

A security company so old I'm always surprised to see the name come up again. And it does. In recent weeks Finjan is making noise typical of young Start-Ups. An interview here, a press release there and two reported rounds of finance which cut founder and early investors out of their holdings and gave the company a value of $20M, nine of it cash.

When Finjan was founded, and this was in January 1996, it had a very clear mission statement - to protect against malicious Java Applets. The mission statement today sounds the same, protect companies from first-strike attacks by malicious code, mainly Java, Active-X, and various scripts. When you look at it, and think of the all the VBS viruses, Finjan sounds like a nice investment at $20M.

What has it been doing for the last five years while the whole world turned around?

It has been playing sucker. Mainly a sucker for Sun, which was hyping Java so hard, it seemed the whole net would run on applets. And when the hype was over, Finjan had no market to sell to. Lucky for them, Microsoft did something to provide them business with the notorious VBS. But it took five years.

This is a lesson to be learnt. And it reminds me of another hyped standard, which comes from a coalition Microsoft is not actively supporting.

Can you guess which?

Wadi Writer #1 (Gray)

WadiList@mail.com

Links:
http://www.finjan.com

From the Wadi Archive:
:: The Word is the Virus - Part 1 :: http://www.oocities.org/wadilist/0046.htm
:: The Word is the Virus - Part 2 :: http://www.oocities.org/wadilist/0047.htm