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

To: Jon Tara who wrote (830)	11/10/1997 11:35:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 878

IBM Plans Future Java OS To Blend PCs, NCs techweb.com This story may have some bearing on my previous post, 829, about Sun getting flack from developers and IBM about licensing term. As to Jon's post about Windows98, well, who cares about Windows 98? Before IE4 came out it was drifting into irrelevance, Microsoft didn't seem to care how much it slipped, and the big corporate bread-and-butter accounts were supposed to go to NT anyway. Now, I guess it's supposed to be the fix that makes IE4 straighten up and fly right, or the final nail in Netscape's coffin, or whatever. If you want a Microsoft internet monopoly, I guess that's fine. I think that, aside from the monopolistic aspects, tangling up the browser and the OS too much is just bad software design. Of course, as I've said before, Microsoft is not the kind of company that let good software design get in the way of its business plan. I have to note, of course, that "Java is a language, not an OS" is the Microsoft company line, except when Java is "a bloated middleware OS", as opposed to the morbidly obese middleware OS that is Windows NT. Java is mostly an attempt at a truly portable language and runtime environment. All computer languages have attempted, to one degree or another, to define a machine/os independent environment, Java just goes farther than most. It's a good idea, but it may fail. If so, I hope it's because the technology fails, and not because Microsoft succeeds in subverting it. I don't expect Java to displace Windows, it's just competition. Developers want independence from Microsoft, something Microsoft's embraced and demolished Java will never give them. Cheers, Dan.