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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: fuzzymath who wrote (24267)	12/7/1999 7:46:00 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Respond to of 64865

your calm collected attitude is inspiring! Aided and abetted by the fact that it isn't really news. This was clearly telegraphed well in advance. It sounds like Sun is rejecting "standardization" I don't think that is it at all. The core message of Java is write once, play anywhere and you can't do that without standardization ... not to mention that you can't have tool interoperability without it. No, I think the question is just how the standards will get defined. Naturally, Sun would actually like to play benevolent dictator here since that is the way to best insure that one's own version of what is right becomes the standard and does so as soon as one has figured out what right is. But, that smells a bit so they tried going to an open standards process. There are two big risks in doing so. One is the possibility that someone like MSFT might exert undo influence and help to destroy the core concept. The other is that the standards will take so long to be defined at each transition that there will either be chaos from people making interim extensions to try to get around problems the standard hasn't addressed yet or that the whole thing will just slow to a crawl waiting for the standards to come around. My bet is that they will come up with another gambit and probably soon. It wouldn't be too surprising to see this just be a Java-specific committee, limited to vendors of pure-Java (keeps out MSFT!).