On 2/7/01 8:18 AM, "Eric Hancock" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> That is not the best way to do business, though. One of Microsoft's vast
> strengths is its ability to come to the show late, but end up dominating a
> market or technology. Few of their products are in-house innovations;
> many, many are improvements of prior work. In fact, there is so little new
> in Java that it can really be seen as a shameless rip-off of features from
> Objective C, C++, ADA, Eiffel, etc...
>
> If the industry standardizes on open, distributed computing based on XML
> message passing, that would be a good thing. Of course, Sun will most
> likely try to 'embrace and extend,' ala MS.
Note Sun embraced Apache, Bind, NFS, Sendmail, or any of the dozens of base
Unix and/or internet standards that Solaris implements now -- without having
extended them. With having only touched the code for them to port and tweak
security/performance/whatever about as much as any Linux distribution does.
I don't see a track record of "embrace and extend ala MS" here.
I don't like being a corporate apologizer, and don't worry, I don't think
that my employer is a saint or walks on water, but come on. Sun doesn't try
to alter the HTTP protocol, or the SMTP protocol, or CORBA, or any of dozens
of other essential services like MS has. Just because Sun is showing up late
to the game in some areas and will have its opinion on certain things (and
will state them even if unpopular) doesn't mean that if XP (or whatever SOAP
is called now) reaches critical mass that Sun will adopt it and then try to
make it its own. It'll just adopt it since customers will want it.
What's my point? I guess I'm saying that it's patently ridiculous to say
that Sun has the same MO as Microsoft. If we pull a MSFT and start trying to
change HTTP unilaterally without public process, then you can compare them
directly to MSFT.
.duncan
--
James Duncan Davidson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
!try; do()
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