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Technology Stocks : Will SUNW bring down MSFT? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Normandi who wrote (800)	11/5/1997 8:58:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 878

Um, Norman, antitrust is a fairly arcane area of the law, and whoever this Scott McMahan is, he is clueless about computers, much less the law. The couple things I looked at are totally baseless. For example , on the reliability of Windows: (from skwc.com I just don't believe that Windows 95 is all that unstable. I max out my Windows 95 machine, which has 48MB of memory and a lot of swap space. I do things to it that the Windows 95 engineers probably would shudder to think about. Software grows on my disk drive like a fungus. It is not uncommon for me to have open GNU Emacs, a shell prompt, a running DB2 database instance, a web browser, several HyperTerm windows to various hosts, and a few other things. With all this going on, I compile and link and run software. And Windows 95 rarely if ever crashes, unlessI screw up somehow in my own programs. Right. Sorry, Scott, buggy applications aren't supposed to crash the OS. If this guy wants to blame himself, that's his perogative, but that's not the way an OS is supposed to work. More on topic, his view of Microsoft's war on Java is so ridiculous that I don't know where to start, so we'll go with just one sentence. The big accusation is that Microsoft is trying to undermine Java's cross-platform nature and purity with their own separate version of Java. Well, that's what Sun wants you to believe. Right, Scott. Compare and contrast: Microsoft declares war www2.computerworld.com The crux of Microsoft's battle plan is its rejection of the JFCs, which it sees as the real threat to Windows. ''They are trying to get this to be a runtime layer to which application vendors write their applications. Those are the APIs they want people to write to. We want them to write to the Windows APIs.'' [ the preceding was attributed to Steve Ballmer] Hence Microsoft's decision to not ship the JFCs. Also describing the Java Foundation Classes as ''a competing operating system'' to Windows, was Microsoft Group Vice President Paul Maritz. He insisted in a separate interview that the company isn't legally required to include Sun's JFCs with Windows, Internet Explorer or any Microsoft product. ''We have no intention of shipping another bloated operating system and forcing that down the throats of our Windows customers,'' Maritz said. Of course, the irony of Microsoft accusing anyone else of having a bloated OS is rich indeed. But there you have it, a direct declaration of war on Java as a portable environment, by top people at Microsoft, vs. this boson Scott McMahon's lengthy apology for Microsoft. So we're supposed to think this guy actually has something to say about antitrust matters? I hope you enjoyed that lengthy piece of content free Microphilia, Norman, because I don't think it would carry much weight with the Judge. The law is the law, and it applies to Microsoft just as it applied to IBM and AT&T before them. Cheers, Dan.