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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JC Jaros who wrote (45921)	6/3/2000 8:39:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

JC - I feel like I have to wade in on the "open" and "Hijack" discussion, since the attitude you seem to be taking here is the opposite of what I think has been the important driving force in the industry for 30 years, including much of the development of the Unix world. I started off as a "Hijacker" more than 30 years ago - control systems I was designing for IBM 1800s needed more direct access to the hardware than IBM's OS provided, so the first thing my programs did was use negative offsets from an array in "Inskel common" (which was an OS-resident common area) to modify the OS. I won't bore you with the details but the fact was that IBM's version of the OS had too much overhead to do the real-time control, my version got the job done. Early "embrace and extend". I later did the same thing in both hardware and software on DEC PDP-11 and VAX systems. The whole of the PC industry was created by a couple of innovators, most notably Compaq, "hijacking" the IBM PC specifications. If Java had been anything like "open" it could have grown a lot more quickly than it has. SUNW's stewardship of Java is not any more open than MSFT's management of their IP. MSFT's work with Java was, as far as I can tell, no more an attempt to "hijack" it than anything else they have done over the years - their versions were optimized for their platform (natch) but the primary intent of MSFT's work seems to have been to develop a version which played to the market and features of the PC world. That is obviously not in SUNW's interest so SUNW has done whatever they could to squash that effort (natch again). SUNW continues to tightly reign in any Java innovation which does not play to their strategic model. I don't happen to think there is anything wrong with SUNW trying to control their IP for the benefit of their company, but all this posturing about "Open" is just so much crap. As a developer who has worked with both companies extensively over the last 10 years, I can say from personal experience that MSFT is more open in their development process than SUNW.