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

To: Hal Rubel who wrote (7598)	5/19/1998 12:08:00 PM
From: Bearded One	Respond to of 74651

I'd like to offer a someone different set of answers to a couple of your questions. Has there been any attempt by Microsoft to preempt the functionality of JAVA on its platform? Microsoft has attempted to change the Java language so that programs written to Microsoft's version will not run on other versions. A bit of background-- you can separate the 'language' portion of Java into three parts: The syntax or grammar, the standard API's or programming libraries published by Sun, and additional programming interfaces put out by companies which can be hardware or O/S specific. You are allowed essentially complete freedom in creating additional programming interfaces if you are a licensee of Java. For example, if you want your Java to be able to make hardware specific calls you can publish API's to do so. What you are not permitted to do is to either change the syntax of the language, or modify the standard interfaces. This is to allow people to have a standard which they can use to make their programs cross-platform. Microsoft has changed both the syntax of Java and the standard interfaces. Are any of these "innovations" really ways to defeat JAVA? Absolutely. Microsoft can add all the functionality it wants by supplying additional API's. Changing the standard API's is deceptive and hurts programmers who want to learn the language. Changing the syntax is the same. To use Bill Gates' analogy, it's like reselling Coke cans after filling them with Pepsi.