I like to use the analogy of a large chain of hotels... or may be just a large hotel... what the heck, any old hotel, which has a collection of Wintel boat anchors which it's considering upgrading to accomodate the latest in MS bloatware. Instead of boggling their minds with a bewildering array of new features, and slaying their machines with a new collection of newly-hatched bugs, why try some slim-ware on some just-do-it hardware? The reduction in total ownership costs -- or TOC if you prefer the TLA -- is as real as the new software products are effective. Business wants efficacy at reasonable cost. Business is results driven, as are users, and there's no way that Bill Gates can tell me with a straight fact that I could not acheive more in less time with better quality using rationally designed, smaller footprint, lower cost software.
The problem is they have a decade of investment in this COM morass which any reasonable person could have told them was brain-dead from the start. They hide behind language independence which actually means VISUAL BASIC and not these newfangled OO sytems. Fortunately for consumers, there is a far better alternative to their procedural, late 70's approach to building software. Java is a threat to Microsoft's smart-appliance strategy, their internet strategy, their enterprise strategy, and so on. The benefits are so pronounced from both the user's and the developer's viewpoint that Microsoft is guaranteed to fail this time. There is no way Windows CE or Windows 98 are going to get a free pass, and I predict that Micrsoft will end up serving the Java community or stop growing. |
