Without doubt (in my mind) MS are yet again trying to harm Java & are taking a calculated gamble that Sun will be negatively impacted by the effort.

But does anyone here recall the early days of UNIX. Back in the early 1980s there were in reality two UNIXs. There was Version 7 from Western Electric (licencing arm for Bell Labs) and there was the same UNIX but with what was known as 'The Berkely Enhancements'.

*All* (yes all) commecially used variants of UNIX, in those early days were UNIX ver 7 with the BE. Noone in the commercial side of business would have entertained delivering a computer with UNIX and without BE - some companies did but they were not target at the commercial market - just experimenters & educational institutes.

BE included Curses, Termcap VI and a whole swap of innovations that lifted UNIX out of the pure acadamia market & into business.

As regards Windows & Java - anyone serious about business will simply either add on a Java feature pack from one of the big Java backers (IBM Sun Oracle Intel etc:) or the companies distributing Windows PCs will add the feature pack on. Java and .NET don't really mean much to john citizen wanting to play games or use office products.

Most Java software comes with Java built in as JRE - of late I have installed a screed of software & it all comes with some form of Java (jdk or jre).

In a sense the action MS are taking is possibly too little to late. So what if a few 'burning logo' applets don't work.

Also who here believes that after WinNT-Win95-Win98-WinMe-Win2000Pro-Win2000Svr that MS can set the world on fire with yet another batch of OSes that are incompatible with earlier ones - read my lips ...

even with a fanfare of propaganda about how wonderful MS was to have invented XML & Web Services "IT AINT GONNA HAPPEN".

MS will continue to be sidelined in the business world by all the enemies they have made - especillay those they added to the list since the DOJ action began.

Cheers

Doug Marker