Wednesday, April 07, 2004
Sun and Microsoft - deja vú all over again
The recent pact between Sun and Microsoft came out of the blue last Friday... yet sounded vaguely familiar...
Remember how Bill Gates "came to Apple's rescue" a few years ago when Apple was in a hole. Of course, Apple then bounced back (though Apple's market share hasn't recovered so perhaps "survived" would be a better term) first with the iMac, then MacOS X, and the rest as they say is history...
That deal seemed kind of odd at the time, unless you put it in the perspective of the subsequent DoJ shenanigans... Sure, Apple had a patent infringement suite against Microsoft at the time citing Windows as a MacOS ripoff (which was in turn a ripoff of the old Xerox Star system, but anyway...). However, what Microsoft really got out of it was a visible competitor... someone Microsoft could point to and say "what? a monopoly? us?". Though by then Linux was certainly a more viable threat than Apple... I wonder if MS would have even bother investing in Apple if they'd known Linux was on the horizon...
Now again, Microsoft has saved a company from the brink of bankruptcy. Arguably Sun deserved to go under because of the horrible way they mismanaged Java - probably the greatest of all non-Microsoft software assets at least before Linux came along, and went through hoops to protect their hardware market (much like Apple... is there a lesson there?).
I'm not sure how things go from here, but the wording around the protection from litigation here pretty means Sun is a spent force in terms of really limiting Microsoft in the development world, and much like Apple, is now destined to be nothing more than a bit player in the broader play being written Windows and Linux.
Taking another tack, I personally think the OS wars are a little past their sell by date, and what I'd far rather see Microsoft do is to port .NET to Linux themselves. On the desktop, I can see Longhorn having enough selling points to still move inventory (plus we'll all need to buy new PCs to be able to run it), but in the back office Windows 2003 Server and Linux are both equally viable... so why shouldn't I be able to write an ASP.NET app that runs on either platform.
That would make the Java investment a moot point, and be a direct threat to Novell and BEA. Back it up with an "investment" in some Linux providers such as Red Hat (to "support this new platform for Microsoft products", etc.), and most of the threats to your world domination will be 0wn3d.
Some MS folks I spoke to thought I was nuts suggesting MS ports to Linux. Being under a single vendor's control would allow .NET to meet Java's original promise. And being seen to have lost a single battle would help keep the government lawyers off their backs until they can consolidate things enough to win the war.
 Am I the only one who gets the creeps from this photo? |
Remember how Bill Gates "came to Apple's rescue" a few years ago when Apple was in a hole. Of course, Apple then bounced back (though Apple's market share hasn't recovered so perhaps "survived" would be a better term) first with the iMac, then MacOS X, and the rest as they say is history...
That deal seemed kind of odd at the time, unless you put it in the perspective of the subsequent DoJ shenanigans... Sure, Apple had a patent infringement suite against Microsoft at the time citing Windows as a MacOS ripoff (which was in turn a ripoff of the old Xerox Star system, but anyway...). However, what Microsoft really got out of it was a visible competitor... someone Microsoft could point to and say "what? a monopoly? us?". Though by then Linux was certainly a more viable threat than Apple... I wonder if MS would have even bother investing in Apple if they'd known Linux was on the horizon...
Now again, Microsoft has saved a company from the brink of bankruptcy. Arguably Sun deserved to go under because of the horrible way they mismanaged Java - probably the greatest of all non-Microsoft software assets at least before Linux came along, and went through hoops to protect their hardware market (much like Apple... is there a lesson there?).
I'm not sure how things go from here, but the wording around the protection from litigation here pretty means Sun is a spent force in terms of really limiting Microsoft in the development world, and much like Apple, is now destined to be nothing more than a bit player in the broader play being written Windows and Linux.
Taking another tack, I personally think the OS wars are a little past their sell by date, and what I'd far rather see Microsoft do is to port .NET to Linux themselves. On the desktop, I can see Longhorn having enough selling points to still move inventory (plus we'll all need to buy new PCs to be able to run it), but in the back office Windows 2003 Server and Linux are both equally viable... so why shouldn't I be able to write an ASP.NET app that runs on either platform.
That would make the Java investment a moot point, and be a direct threat to Novell and BEA. Back it up with an "investment" in some Linux providers such as Red Hat (to "support this new platform for Microsoft products", etc.), and most of the threats to your world domination will be 0wn3d.
Some MS folks I spoke to thought I was nuts suggesting MS ports to Linux. Being under a single vendor's control would allow .NET to meet Java's original promise. And being seen to have lost a single battle would help keep the government lawyers off their backs until they can consolidate things enough to win the war.
# posted 4/07/2004 02:39:59 PM |
