ZD Net's take on the Java news

... and it aint too favorable.
[link|http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/zd/20010719/tc/microsoft_the_tonya_harding_of_technology_1.html|
Microsoft: The Tonya Harding of technology]
By Michael C. Daconta, Enterprise

What do you do if you can't win a fair competition? Club your opponent in the knees. That seems to be Microsoft's tactic against Java, a programming standard Microsoft doesn't control.
....
Microsoft's intent here is clearly to blunt Java's momentum. The company hopes IT managers will now perceive Java as having one more obstacle for deployment on a client PC, and developers will perceive Java as losing a place on the desktop, which may diminish the demand for Java programmers. This is an attempt to retard Java while Microsoft completes its .Net implementation. Microsoft is desperately trying to turn back the clock and erase Java's six-year advantage. Can it do that? Only if anti-trust laws are meaningless.

Microsoft's act may kill the casual use of applets for advertisements, navigation, and Web animations. But Sun Microsystems has been pulling away from applets ever since they were launched and is pushing alternatives like Web-deployable applications (Web Start), Java plug-ins, and dynamically generated HTML interfaces via Java Server Pages, as in the Java Server Faces graphical toolkit.

Microsoft is using every trick in the book to persuade developers that their rightful home is Windows. They appeal to greed (make more money with us), to capitalist principles (the GPL is communism), to the vanity of widespread application deployment (we're number one), to the ease of development (wizards will do everything), and finally to uncertainty (better to stick with the safe horse).

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

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