Hello Paul,
I'll tell you ... a long week. We're doing an internal training all this week and it's tough to keep up on things.
> A world of only Windows
Please ... don't scare me! ;-)
> In case you didn't catch it Scott, we have been living in a world
> of only Windows since Win 3.1.
I would have to agree that Windows is the only client application development environment that seemed to capitalize on the client-server shift. UNIX apps were still to bulky and expensive to develop for the masses (X-Windows still wasn't as "snappy" looking, and didn't run on the new toy PCs ...) and the host environments just didn't convert to clean client-server applications quick enough. They seemed to focus on the reall big applications.
> The question is can there ever be an alternative to this world, not
> whether it exists.
Being a strong evolutionist I would argue that the question is "when" there will be an alternative to this world. Everything changes. It might be 50 years, 100 years, or 200 years, but as humans we always want that change to occur in our lifetime (greedy?) or else we tend to state that it will "never" occur.
> That's where your company comes in.
> Without a world of JAVA based apps there isn't a niche you can
> think of that MSFT will not occupy.
Well ... then that spells doom for *ALL* businesses and jobs? I don't think so. That would mean that all other computer companies will cease to exist. I'm not sure it's that extreme. Evolution is an interesting thing. If Java isn't it, other things will come along. Lucent is still quietly working away on Inferno (Oh I like my investment in LU ... more than doubled in less than a year!) which I think is a superior solution to Java ... and it runs Java apps!
> ===================================
> Incidently Scott I always get a kick out of people that tell me
> JAVA apps can't run as fast as Windows apps.
There is a lot of money pouring into solving that problem. JITs and hardware Java processors will help. There are a lot of optimizations, along with distributed execution. Client-Network ... develop ways to use the unused cycles on other machines!
> When the PC came out, we wrote programs with a 64K code
> restriction. We bypassed the OS graphics system and wrote our own
> primitives and managed our own memory. When I started in this
> business, many years before that, having 22K was considered a
> programming luxury. So what happened?
I agree ... you actually had a TON of memory ... when I wrote my first CP/M BIOS I did it for an 8085 and only had 8k of memory (using the revolutionary 2k static RAM chips! Wow!)
> Did somebody forget how to write code? What's the problem with
> JAVA?
I think that what we are witnessing would be similiar to Henry Ford returning to see a car being built. Boy could he tell us stories about how simple cars were back then! Why would we ever be driving these big wasteful cars?
> I know Gates problem with code has always been using hardware power
> to overcome the grotesque excesses of his bad programmers. And
> Intel has obliged.
Actually I admire what Gates has done to accept the C++ object model and begin large amounts of code-reuse. Microsoft has been working for years to build libraries of objects and is now reusing them throughout their product line. This is what has allowed them the rapid time to market ... and he probably learned this from Borland!
> So what's the problem at Novell? What's your answer to embedding
> Windows programs in a Web page? You must have one. Does it work?
Why Windows applications? I think that if you look at the work being done at IBM today, they are hard at work developing Java applications for business. The key is content ... applications. Right now we fully support Windows applications from a services perspective ... when you click file->save NetWare obeys. When you click file->print NetWare obeys. We even offer higher level integration by adding NDS tot he equation to allow for browsing network resources and accessing them.
As for the Web and Internet, that is the transition to Java and distributed objects. We need to make sure that we offer a rich set of services for Windows platforms, but also Java platforms, and the future platforms. It's coming together, but watching the market many companies are somewhat throttled by what the 100% Java group does. Remember, the Java people don't want anyone doing anything that is not 100% pure Java ... even if there is no alternative. Microsoft has decided to say "Too bad ... if it's not there we'll do it ourselves ..."
I won't argue that this is an incorrect approach ...
Purely my opinion ...
Scott C. Lemon |
