By: Jose_X

Jose_X — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 02:15:04 +0000

>> Of course I agree that we must win against the Java platform, but a belief that we have to just match everyone else’s actions one for one is fundamentally misguided and wrong it makes us a commodity player, one of the pack, instead of the leader.

>> and (C) make damned sure that our new value is really hard to copy so it doesn’t show up tomorrow in Sun’s or Oracle’s offerings.

>> So It is with some amazement that I listen to a number of people who just don’t get it who think we should do work that actually makes it easier to copy our work and to run apps written for Windows on other platforms. That flies in the face of everything we are trying to do – it’s almost like a suicide attempt. The philosophy here seems to be “our competitors’ products are getting more press than ours, so we should kill ours and build copies of theirs instead.” This is foolish.

>> But we are explicitly not in the business of making it easy for people to write apps that get all the features of Windows on a non-Windows platform

>> This is all the exact opposite of what we want to happen. It is critical to us that application writers choose to take advantage of features that are (A) part of Windows, end (B) extremely hard to clone. Therefore it …would be a huge mistake if we (A) spent all of our energy just embracing other companies’ innovations, or (B) asked key groups to do extra work that makes it that much easier to replace Windows, such as making Visual Basic apps run on the Java virtual machine.

[Ignoring the patent issue..] Maybe the mono effort still has hope, but it would need to change priorities to focus on moving value unique to Windows onto Linux rather than making (subpar) value added to Linux be easy to be moved to Windows or winFOSS apps be easy and likely to be moved onto the more capable closed MSdotnet.

Dotnet can’t be a better Java than Java (from the FOSS-friendly pov) because Sun “owned” and protected Java from Microsoft’s embrace/extend. MSdotnet/mono already comes with the extensions onto “Java” that Microsoft was not legally able to get away with adding to the real Java [Sun, Novell, Oracle.. no one can help us here from Microsoft]. Further, there are many patent advantages in Microsoft’s favor in the fake Java case. Further, Microsoft designed dotnet carefully to meet their needs and has a lot invested in that platform, more so than ever could have been the case for Java; dotnet was designed for extension and for every other need Microsoft would have.

Comments on: Microsoft on “Embrace and Extend”, the “Windows API Franchise”

By: Jose_X