Chaz, I read that article before Sal posted it. I would have commented, but the whole thing sounded garbled to me. VM-less Java? That would be, compiled to native code? Not that that wouldn't make sense in Windows world, but I don't think that's the current line from Bill & co. either. Not yet, anyway. The line has always been portable bytecodes with native OS calls, which always has me scratching my head. Maybe it's supposed to be good for Wince where there actually is some diversity in the processors it runs on.
As to the title of the article, I got to send Sal a quote back from that Fortune article that Keith cited, Microsoft: Is Your Company Its Next Meal? pathfinder.com :
Ingle has watched Microsoft creep ever closer to the newspaper business, even as executives claimed the company wasn't interested in hiring reporters or offering classifieds--both of which it does today. "Microsoft has a long history of telling the big lie," he says. "They say, 'We're not going to do this! We're not going to do this!' up until the point when the whole world knows they're doing it."
Of course, the relevant big lie there was told by Bill himself, before an audience of newspapermen no less, to some derision from yours truly and other observers. I've been accused of the big lie myself, for using "coercion" in the context of Microsoft's OEM dealings. Some Objectivist informed me that "coersion" is what goes on in Bosnia, not what Joachim Kempin does. Meanwhile, the title of the Fortune article leads us back to Sal's bete noire, smart-mouthed Scott McNealy, known for the personal slogan "Do lunch or be lunch", or some such. For Sal and Scott, we have this somewhat less than flattering profile from the New Yorker,
Letter From Silicon Valley The Sun King magazines.enews.com
Subtitled "How Scott McNealy became the Anti-Gates. ". To which I would waggishly add, it's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it. It turns out Scott has some remote Cheesehead ties of a sort, his father was a higher up in the late, unlamented American Motors, which was headquartered in Detroit but had its assembly plants in Wisconsin.
Finally, a parting shot from Scott the smart-mouth, on the subject of proposed antitrust remedies:
Sun Microsystems Inc. CEO Scott McNealy said that just this morning he was "on the phone with Washington talking about remedies in the Microsoft case." McNealy made this claim during a keynote speech before an audience of Sun resellers in Palm Springs, Calif., attending an annual briefing.
"I think many people will be offering remedies," McNealy continued. "Ours are not printable."
From zdnet.com , where esteemed ilk sister Mary Jo Foley is apparently on the antitrust beat now. McNealy may be a smart mouth, but what the heck, hairball seems as good a term as any for the multithousand call "Win32 API". Think it'll break into 5 figures by the time NT5 ships?
Cheers, Dan. |
