Hi Leyland,
> > Do you think that M$ is not threatened by the ability of any
> > computer to send a program to any other computer?
>
> I for one think that, dotNet, is microsofts way of saving their
> butt from potentially being split up. If they split off the OS
> side of microsoft, they will still have the dotNet platform as
> an intergrated part of their software and online business. They
> have anounced support of their software on a number of OSs. So
> if they lose the OS side of their business, they will still have
> a platform to which they control and make standards for. Which
> on top of that, will have a better ability to protect against
> warezing of their software (its hard to crack software that is
> not completely on your computer), and they can rent their software
> and include it as a package of MSN.
>
> At least this is my opinion, there is a number of things I dont
> know. What I do know is that its primarily vaporware right now,
> so there is nothing to worry about currently.
It is a plausible theory. But they may be creating .Net for
more than one reason (good strategies often serve more than
one purpose).
The anti-trust case revealed an internal Microsoft planning
document that said "kill cross-platform Java by growing the
polluted Java market" (NY Times, 25 May 1998). And indeed
Microsoft did create a version of Java that did not obey the
standard. This violated their license agreement with Sun,
which sued and won. Forced by the courts to obey the standard,
Microsoft chose to drop development of Java altogether. And
around that time they started pitching C# and .Net. These are
also supposed to be cross-platform, but with one important
difference: there is no license agreement preventing Microsoft
from creating their own variations which will destroy the
cross-platform capabilities.
Unix was much more portable than the vendor-specific systems
that preceded it, but was still splintered into lots of
different flavors despite the Posix standards. The key
difference for Java is the license agreement that enforces
standardization.
If we want the capability for any computer to be able to send
a program to any other computers, we need a language and APIs
with strong standardization.
Cheers,
Bill
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