One thing you left out of your great post is that, in keeping with its cross-platform strategy, Netscape is going to build its browser after 5.0/Mercury (6.0?) in Java.
news.com
All of this business about "marrying" Java to Windows is really just a way to destroy Java as a cross-platform language, or at least neuter it. If Chairman Bill gets his way, Java will be just another compuer programming language like C++ and Perl.
This whole Java affair is shaping up into a very interesting strategic battle. It looks like its going to be a race between Sun and Netscape on the one hand, trying to add OS functionality (note Chairman Bill's comments in the piece I linked to regarding the "redundancy" of OS features in Java), and Apple and Microsoft, on the other, trying to bolt Java down to their respective operating systems through native API calls. I guess that, by writing Java apps that use Rhapsody native platform functions, thereby furthering Chairman Bill's goal to divide and conquer Java, Apple is repaying Microsoft for its decision a while back to devote a whole team of programmers to writing applcations for the Mac. Chairman Bill always did say he likes the Mac. Now I know why.
Now, for some more "choice cuts," with corresponding editorial annotations:
Chairman Bill says:
You can be sure that every hardware company, if they hook developers through Java or any other means, will then optimize Java for their environment, and fragment the market just as they have in
the past with Unix.
And, from the Peanut Gallery, someone responds:
You can be sure that, if Microsoft hooks developers into Windows, it will then optimize Windows for each of the myriad environments it will have to run on in order for Chairman Bill's vision of the "single technical infrastructure" (see the Chairman's comments excerpted below) to come true. That will then fragment the market, just as is already happening with DOS, Windows 3.X, Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows CE . . .
This is going to happen for the simple, obvious reason that the requirements of an OS designed for a mainfram or supercomputer are not the same as those of an OS for a pocket calculator.
Chairman Bill says:
We're committed to enabling businesses to have a single technical infrastructure on which to build their internal and external applications--for employees, for partners and vendors, for customers.
And someone from the Peanut Gallery shouts back:
This sounds an awfully lot like what Netscape has been promoting for some time, initially in their vision papers on the extranet and now with their crosware initiative.
The problem is that for Chiarman Bill's version of this vision to come true, everyone will have to be running Windows for all of their buisness computing needs. And the problem with that is that, as the scalability day fiasco shows, Windows is not now, and will not be for some time, ready to take on the full range of a large business' computing needs. Furthermore, as the ever-awaited Unix version of IE demonstrates, Microsoft is not a company that is devoted to writing software to platforms other than Windows (and the Mac OS).
So, while Sun and Netscape have their work cut out for them in adding OS features to Java, it seems to me that Microsoft (and Apple) have their work cut out for them in porting their OS to all these new hardware platforms. After all, the only way someone running a mainframe or a pocket computer is going to be able to take advantage of a Java program written to native Windows functions is if the mainframe or pocket computer runs Windows.
So, Microsoft has a problem. If Chairman Bill's world comes to pass, what you are really going to end up with is Java optimized for a bunch of different environments and Windows optimized for a bunch of different environments. And you are still going to have a lot of confusion because Microsoft is not a cross-platform company. It simply does not get the internet. |
