MS vs JAVA/Sun
==== COMMENTARY ====
(contributed by Paul Thurrott, news editor, thurrott@winnetmag.com)
In a meeting with Microsoft officials last week, I heard a bit of
trivia that should have been obvious but that surprised me
nonetheless. When asked whether Microsoft would support Sun
Microsystems' server-based Java technology in the next Windows .NET
Server (Win.NET Server) version, John Montgomery, the group product
manager for the Developer Platform and Evangelism Group at Microsoft,
said no but noted that Sun was as free to build on Microsoft's server
platform as anyone else. Montgomery then explained that the world
would have been a very different place if Sun had made different
decisions at crucial points in its relationship with Microsoft. Here's
what happened, and how things might have turned out much differently.
In December 1995, Microsoft announced an abrupt strategy shift in
which the company reorganized its business around the Internet. The
announcement, touched off by Bill Gates's earlier "Internet Tidal
Wave" memo to employees at the company, included a couple of shocking
interoperability revelations: Microsoft would expand its licensing of
Spyglass's Web browser code to port the Microsoft Internet Explorer
(IE) product to Windows 3.x, UNIX, and the Macintosh; and the company
would license Java, the popular Web-oriented programming language.
Java had an interesting beginning at Sun, the high-end server and
enterprise-class UNIX vendor. According to popular legend, developer
James Gosling had decided to create a new programming language for a
set-top box that the company was then designing but later scrapped.
Looking out his office window for inspiration, Gosling saw a tree and
dubbed the object-oriented language "Elm." But the name Elm was
already taken, so Gosling settled on Java. Over the next few years,
Java sat in limbo as Sun's set-top box plans folded. But with the rise
of the Internet, Gosling saw that a small and elegant programming
language like Java could be quite useful, and so it was redesigned for
that purpose.
Microsoft originally didn't trust Sun or Java because of the
possibility that developers would prefer Java over Windows. Java
applications, applets, and services run in a software "sandbox," a
protected environment that sits on top of various OSs such as UNIX,
Windows, and the Mac OS. If developers were to accept Java as the
overlying platform for their OSs, Windows would lose its importance.
So Microsoft surprised everyone and licensed the Java technology from
Sun. According to the licensing agreement, Microsoft would be able to
"modify, adapt, and create derivative works of Sun's Java technology,"
which is exactly what the company did, creating a Java version that
ran better on Windows and offered unique Windows-only features. During
1996 and 1997, Microsoft invested heavily in Java, releasing Java
interfaces to various Microsoft applications and creating a Java
development environment called Visual J++ (VJ++). The company even
held Java-oriented developer events and was reportedly working on Java
components for Microsoft Office. A future version of Visual Studio
(VS) was going to generate Java byte codes--the underlying executable
format that programs written in Java use.
The company's distributed Java strategy was interesting. Sensing a
move to Internet-based software subscriptions--a term more common
today than it was 4 or 5 years ago--Microsoft began adapting its
Windows-only component technologies (which the company referred to by
the umbrella term Windows DNA) to include cross-platform hooks through
Java. Java would have been the gatekeeper, or glue, between software
components running on Windows servers. And with Java, Microsoft
finally had an interoperability strategy for communicating with
non-Windows systems.
If you're familiar with what became .NET, the information in the
preceding paragraph should sound familiar. But somewhere along the
line, Microsoft's plans for Java completely fell apart. Sun sued
Microsoft in October 1997 for violating the Java licensing terms. And
when it became clear that Sun was going to win the case--as it
eventually did in an early 2001 settlement, Microsoft slowly but
surely walked away from Java and did its own thing. "Had Sun not
decided to compete through the courts, we would have happily continued
using Java, and .NET never would have happened," Montgomery said.
Faced with the prospect of not being able to improve Java, Microsoft
started working up internal strategies for cross-platform,
Internet-based subscription software. The company had already hired
longtime Borland software architect Anders Hejlsberg, who created the
Turbo Pascal compiler and the Delphi Visual Component Library (VCL),
to work on Java technologies. Hejlsberg was set to working up a new,
Java-like programming language eventually named C#. But C# isn't
Hejlsberg's most important contribution to Microsoft. His creation of
the logical and powerful class library and runtime environment Common
Language Runtime (CLR) is credited with making .NET a huge hit with
developers.
In some ways, the Sun-Microsoft feud was a good thing. The .NET
platform as it now stands is more powerful than anything the company
could have accomplished with Sun, thanks to .NET's from-scratch
architecture, support for multiple programming languages, and use of
standards-based technologies such as XML and Simple Object Access
Protocol (SOAP). And, in response to criticism of Sun for not doing
the same for Java, Microsoft has taken the high road and worked to
make key portions of .NET open standards that are available for anyone
to use. Microsoft will also open more of .NET to standards bodies over
the next few years, Montgomery said.
Sun, of course, is still positioning Java for Web services, and the
possibility exists that Java will be in place years from now, working
side by side with .NET technologies. But if Sun could have found some
way of working with Microsoft, avoided its lengthy and ultimately
damaging court case, and positioned Java as an open standard, Sun
might have driven the move to the Web services platforms of the
future. Instead, although Java will be a player in Web services, its
position will probably be as a minor player relegated to non-Microsoft
platforms. Do you think Sun would do it differently if it had a second
chance?
he sory....chan jo au änglisch, abär ich lis das sichär nöd, wäni hei chumä und zimlich "müäd" bin, durä!
und zum text (woni ebä scho bitz gläsä han): find, wiä immär: "alläs wird guät!"
Sun und MS sind beide nicht schön wenns um Firmenpraktiken geht.
Aber Sun hat hier genaugleich gehandelt wie MS. Die Schuld der Sun zuzuschieben ist sicher keine gute Idee (wird der bezahlt?).
Dotnet mag ja hübsch sein. Wenn es sich durchsetzt werden es die Leute hassen lernen (stichwort DRM, software leasing etc.) und nein Lamber, das sind keine Fantasien. Darüber wurde schon geschrieben, von seriösen Leuten.
ja, DRM tönt schlimm, und jagt mir ein wenig Angst ein...
OT: Wer wusste alles noch nicht, dass Media Player 8 MS Komplettzugriff auf deinen Rechner gewährt?
tut mir leid, aber es ist nicht so einfach, auf ein os != windows umzusteigen, wenn man
1. nicht so viel zeit und lust hat, um sich einzuarbeiten und alles zu konfigurieren
2. nicht auf etwa 90% der anwendungen und anwendungstypen verzichten will, die man so kennt. und das argument, dass es ja auch alles auf linux gebe, stimmt so einfach nicht.
3. haben die otto-normal-würzer die wahl nicht... oder hast du etwa die wahl, wie das metall in deinem auto gehärtet wird? weisst du überhaupt etwas darüber? nicht? so ähnlich ist es mit den otto-normal-würzen.
Schon mal gelesen was Microsoft bei XP schreibt wenn es eine Fehlerbericht versenden will?
Wir beabsichtigen nicht, Ihren Namen woeiw Adresse, E-Mailadresse, Dateien .... usw. zu ermitteln. Es kann aber vorkommen dass Fehlerberichte Kundenspezifische Informationen enhält wie Daten aus geöffneten Dateien. Und jetzt das beste: Diese Informationen, falls vorhanden können zum Feststellen ihrer Indentität verwendet werden.
Na Ja selbstvertändlich kann man einsehen was da wirklich versendet wird aber ausser irgendwelchen verschlüsselten Code gibts da nichts zu sehen
