SUNW's JAVA ONE VS. MICROSOFT'S .NET -
Over the last few months I've been accumulating SUNW, at ever lower prices, for the long term......looking for reasonable profits 3 to 5 years out.
A friend of mine, who is a System's Analyst at a very large aerospace firm, says his only concern is that Microsoft's .Net software platform may eventually take a significant market share away from SUNW's Java software platform.
Below is an excerpt from a post on another message board:
You say, "Microsoft has XML"? Ha, that would be like saying "some company owns HTML" No one company owns it. It is a set of conventions used to standardize data formats. The group that came up with it is a non-commercial organization called W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium).
JAVA ONE also supports XML. The JAVA interface to XML was written a long time ago. At any rate, XML is not an issue. Every company will support something that becomes a standard. The question is .NET vs. JAVA ONE. JAVA ONE currently has a vast majority of the market because .NET started competing very late in the game.
If .NET picks up and becomes a dominant standard, SUNW will lose BIG TIME. In the Case of a .NET victory, all the businesses would start buying Microsoft's machines because developers would be writing in .NET which will work only on Windows machines => less Unix => less SUNW.
Do you remember what happened to Apple in the 1980's? They had a better product than anyone out there, but Macs never became a standard for various reasons, including management mistakes within company. Hence, weaker products (that became standards) started selling and developers were thus writing software for those winning platforms, which even further isolated Apple.
However, It is very unlikely that .NET will actually win the battle. First, JAVA has a HUGE advantage right now. Second, Unix servers dominate the business environment. Why would a business decide to switch to Microsoft when their products are known to be slower and less stable? Furthermore, every business knows that switching to Microsoft will mean less choice in future. Once you have a Microsoft platform you're stuck with Microsoft. On the other hand, if you choose an open environment, such as JAVA ONE, you can buy any hardware you want in future, and any number of different platforms will all work with JAVA ONE. This way the businesses would not be limiting themselves.
Furthermore, 80% of the universities in the world are teaching JAVA right now as the intro programming language. Unix dominates academia. When the next generation of programmers comes out, they will all be comfortable with JAVA and UNIX. On the other hand, I really don't know ANYONE who knows how to program in C# (Microsoft's .NET language). Nor do I know anyone who cares to learn it quite yet. JAVA is the Language of choice right now and people are being educated on JAVA technology. This factor is not to be underestimated.
This is why I can never see .NET taking over. It might have some success, and it might gain some respectful acceptance by the programming community, but it will never become a dominant development platform. So, in conclusion, in my mind JAVA ONE is the preferred software development platform of the future. This means -> more Unix -> more SUNW Servers -> more SUNW Services around JAVA solutions -> more business platforms being based on Sun solutions -> more money for SUNW -> more money for me.
I would really appreciate responses, if any, to the opinion above.
TIA,
Dave |
