Microsoft has already added Windows-specific facilities to their current Sun-licensed Java. Those additions, together with the omission of the corresponding facilities developed by Sun to do the same kind of thing in a non-OS-specific way, are exactly what's being litigated in Judge Whyte's courtroom.
But I agree with you Mephisto. I believe there's NO problem in practice with this announcement. I was afraid that the stock might take a hit today because those who don't really understand the situation would attribute more importance to it than it has in practice. Fortunately it didn't. One of those times when I'm glad to be wrong.
In practice, there is no stopping Java on either the server or the thin client side. Whatever Microsoft does in this area is doomed to failure, because people realize that Web applications are the future, and there simply is no benefit to tying a Web application to anything you have to pay Microsoft for.
Microsoft's interest is to tie things to Windows. The performance issues are being addressed; that has been shown on this board today by other posters. Performance problems on the server side, where Java's main task is to help create a platform-independent distributed object environment that isn't owned by any one company, haven't been documented as far as I have seen. Much of server-side Java will be compiled, and certainly there is nothing inherent in Java that makes it any harder to compile to efficient code than, say, current versions of C++.
If the principal objection to Java is the performance of client-side byte-code interpreters (JVM's), Sun, and Java, are in pretty good shape. Important advances in software often push the envelope of hardware's ability to support them. These important advances quite simply don't take place in the Microsoft world, where you get charged for decades-old 16-bit code.
Regards,
--QwikSand |
