Bipin and All:
The news on IBM, Sun, Oracle, and NetScape getting together to push for NCs is great. But in my opinion it is widely taken that this alliance is meant to defeat Microsoft. In my humble opinion, eventhough this may very well be the intention (at least by Oracle and NetScape), the main gain will be for hardware vendors such as Sun and IBM and not necessarily for Oracle or NetScape (that are more in this deal for software reasons than hardware). Sun and IBM will gain greatly because NCs will become a reality as time is passed. Howevere I am not sure if the intentions as assumed by most people are to defeat Microsoft, will succeed. I maybe wrong but by looking at the latest efforts done by Microsoft and its ActiveX technology I think Microsoft has truly done an outstanding job (and this is from a software engineer's point of view and not necessarily as an investor). With ActiveX you can write controls very easily (using for example Visual Basic 5.0 and/or Visual C++ 5.0 or the next version of Visual J++), and then have these controls downloaded and used by applets and other Web Aware applications very easily. Java will become irrelavant and its only legacy will be the internet model that Sun innovated and introduced to the industry. Microsoft has stolen this model (which is absolutely OK with Sun since all they care about is for the model to succeed in order for their hardware business to succeed). Sun's internet model has been very well adopted by Microsoft into the ActiveX technology. And with Microsoft now being so hot on the Unix market to make the ActiveX technology work on UNIX platforms, Sun and IBM and to some extend Oracle will gain greatly but not so much NetScape (as it becomes a thing of the past, sort of like Novel). I know many people on this thread do not like Microsoft, but believe me if you look at the latest set of technology introduced through ActiveX and its flexibility and availability through usage of Java (and for that matter any language - even if one really wants you can make a COBOL application into ActiveX and have it run on any platform!!) and its portability to UNIX platforms (through Microsoft's VM and web browser) you will see that Microsoft has truly adopted ('stolen'!) Sun's internet model. True, ActiveX still does not have the ideal security model introduced by Sun but I am sure Microsoft will eventually take care of that also. In anycase Sun, IBM, HP and smaller companies such as Auspex will gain greatly from Microsoft and its unitentional push for the aggressive growth of servers and the NC market. Just my opinion, of course!
Regards,
- Addi Jamshidi |
