On Oct 21, 3:06 am, Chris Adamson <[email protected]> wrote: > A few historical notes: > > * This sort of reverts to the state the Mac was in around '97 or '98, > when there were many competing VMs for the Mac (developer-oriented VMs > from Metrowerks and Roaster, user-oriented VMs from Microsoft and > Netscape, etc.). At the time, Apple licensed Java from Sun and said > it would be better for users to have a single, system-standard JVM. > Obviously, times have changed.
Don't forget that in 97/98, the dot-com reality distortion field was in full swing. Your sole goal as a company consisted of spending as much money as possible acquiring market share, and figuring out how to make money came "later." I don't see that same dynamic helping in the current situation. At least Apple could make some money off their JVM investment by selling hardware to Java developers. What is a 3rd party's financial incentive for providing a Mac JVM, when end-users are conditioned to think that downloading these types of "add ons" (Flash/Java, etc) are Free as in beer. > > * At least once, I've wondered aloud about whether Java on the Mac is > more important to Apple or Sun (now Oracle, of course). Would a lack > of Java hurt Mac sales, or hurt Java's cross-platform legitimacy? > Maybe now we're going to find out. Indeed. I suspect Apple will lose a little money on hardware sales that would have previously gone to Java developers. But then again, they're making so much money right now they probably won't even notice. Rob -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
