On Jan 18, 2:58 am, Chris Adamson <[email protected]> wrote: > The Posse put out a call for predictions in #336.
Here are mine. At an Apple media event in April, Steve Jobs announces to a stunned audience that the next iOS and Mac OS X versions will be written in Javascript in order to improve the "developer experience". "Until now", Steve declares, "you had an awful language that nobody else used to write your apps. Now you'll use an awful language that everybody uses." When beta testers complained that iOS and OS X run pretty slow, Steve answers by email: "You're running it wrong." Joe from the Java Posse demands to rename themselves to "Javascript Posse", but his request is declined. Shortly after the Apple announcement, Google announces that they bought Adobe and will rewrite all their applications in Flash. Google CEO Larry Page says at the press conference: "Because no one man should decide the future of the Internet and to foster open innovation, we decided to use the open Flash format for the benefit of our users instead of Apple's proprietary Javascript." When asked by a reporter whether it isn't really Google deciding the future of the Internet, Larry replies: "Well, at least we're two men - for now.". Andy Rubin, head of Google's mobile business, starts tweeting the number of Flash downloads. Tor from the Java Posse demands to rename themselves to "Actionscript Posse", but his request is declined. Former Microsoft Office head and new Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announces that Nokia sells its Symbian smartphone business to Microsoft. In a joint press conference, Steve Ballmer announces that "to honor the year the first Symbian smartphone came out, we'll rebrand Symbian as 'Windows Mobile 95, Second Edition'". Stephen Elop states "Nokia wants to focus on one mobile operating system called Me-too to effectively compete with Apple, for instances in tablets with a stylus and smartphones with a physical keyboard". Microsoft now is the biggest smartphone vendor in the world and announces that by 2013, all of its phone will be updated over the air to use Bing as the default search engine. Andy Rubin from Google starts tweeting the number of Android activations again. Dick from the Java Posse demands to rename themselves to "Symbian Posse" to honor Tor, but his request is declined because Tor is from Norway, not from Finland. Oracle releases JDK 7 in July "ahead of schedule". Industry research suggests enthusiastic uptake for the new release - minus the Java developers that maintain EJB 2.x applications (50%), the ones that write mobile and tablet apps (45%) and the ones that "wait for JDK 8" (4%). The remaining one percent uses JDK 7 and founds the "Java Programmers Anonymous (JPA)" to voice their interests, with JPA offices opened in San Francisco and Bangalore. Meeting once a week under the portrait of James Gosling, most JPA discussions revolve around why Firefly was really canceled and why nobody gets the "JPA" joke. The JPA demands to rename the Java Posse to "Java 7 Posse", but this request is declined. To better compete with Oracle, IBM buys SAP. This is a marriage made in heaven because both companies excel at selling expensive and awful software to the CIO that only the sales guys can use during carefully script demos. Larry Ellison is hopping mad and challenges the IBM CEO to a yacht race, like "real men do", but the IBM CEO declines. Angered by his continued failure with Apple TV, Steve Jobs buys Comcast and offers the new Apple TV to every Comcast customer for $99. When users complain that the only TV channel they get on their new Apple TV is the Disney Channel, Steve Jobs answers in a email: "If you want to watch porn, buy an Android phone." Market researches find a sudden spike of Android usage among former Comcast customers. Andy Rubin starts tweeting how great his Comcast service was before Apple took over. Microsoft's stock tanks after the first Symbian phones show blue screens of death with the a firmware release. Larry Ellison is still mad at IBM, so he buys Microsoft in a hostile take-over. In an unprecedented corporate restructuring, he fires every Microsoft employee, moves the development of Windows and Office to Bangalore, open sources .NET and sells everything else. Oracle promises to maintain Windows and Office "for as long as anybody uses it, but not as longs as Windows could run DOS applications" and offers migration paths to Solaris and OpenOffice. Yahoo gets Microsoft's online business and assures the world that "we know now to deal with failing online assets". Google buys the Xbox, rebrands it "Google TV 2.0" and renames Xbox Live to "Google Games". Because "no one man should decide the future of television and to foster open innovation", Google open sources the former Xbox operating system. But because the "Microsoft code is so messy", Google withholds the actual source code. When open source advocates complain, Google CEO Larry Page issues an official statement: "What we actually meant was that we open innovated the Google TV 2.0 operating system". Nobody knows what that really means. Andy Rubin starts tweeting the number of minutes users spend playing online games in Google Games. Shortly after the Microsoft sale, the city of Seattle declares bankruptcy, hampered by the loss of Microsoft taxes and salaries. Larry Ellison wants to buy Seattle because he "always liked the Space Needle", but his lawyers find out that he can't. He invites the major of Seattle on his yacht, but the major's lawyers find out he can't accept. Ex-Sun- and Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Ex-Microsoft-CEO Steve Ballmer found the "Billionaires against Larry Ellison Society". Despite being well-funded, the movement never gets much traction, apart from an endorsement by James Gosling and the JPA. When Jonathan Schwartz threatens to blog again about how successfully he runs a company, Eric and Steve let him join and rename themselves to "Billionaires (and millionaires) against Larry Ellison Society". In order to compete with Facebook, Android 3.1 has a new social network called "Google Mobile Buzz". It immediately publishes the user's location, his phone calls, emails, text messages and applications to a public Google web site and labels everybody within reach of the same cell tower a "Google friend". Google CEO Larry Page states that Google Mobile Buzz exists "because no one man should decide the future of the Internet (and this time we mean Mark Zuckerberg) and to foster open innovation". When privacy experts raise concerns, Google replies officially: "When you do no evil, you have nothing to hide." Google Mobile Buzz is off to a slow start since only 5% of all Android phones ever get a firmware upgrade. And Rubin starts tweeting the number of friends he gets through Google Mobile Buzz. Wikileaks publishes Larry Ellison's tax filings which prove that he's the richest man in the world. An Oracle investigation finds that Larry Ellison himself sent his filings to Wikileaks. In an official statement Larry Ellison declares that "The world deserves to know who has the most dough. And SAP still stinks, even if it's inside IBM. And that IBM guy wouldn't even race me!" In a move that takes both Nintendo and Sony by surprise, Google offers its Google TV 2.0 and all games for free - if the users run Kinect cameras in every room and sit through 15 minutes of advertisements for every hour of a game. In a slightly different announcement, Google CEO Larry Page says: "Since no one man should decide the future of games (and now we mean Steve Jobs again) and because we want to give people what they really want - relevant ads - we have decided to broaden the user base for our groundbreaking Google TV device". When challenged by privacy experts about the implications of this move, Google releases an official statement: "The epilepsy warnings in the game manuals already ask the user to take a 15 minute break every hour. Google just fills this empty space with meaningful context." When pressed for comments on the implications of cameras constantly watching users, Larry Page replies in an interview: "We don't think we'll learn anything about users that we didn't already know, but we want to be on the safe side." Andy Rubin starts tweeting the number of Google TV users who say bad things about Steve Jobs. Grabbing headlines for the last time in 2011, Larry Ellison causes an international crisis in the holiday season. Interviewed on his yacht, he replies to a question about the JCP that "at least the JCP is more democratic than the Chinese parliament". Embarrassed in front of the world, the Chinese parliament meets for an emergency session and immediately halts the worldwide shipment of toys to children both old (smartphones, tablets) and young (toys). After a week of pressure building, Mr. Ellison caves in and states: "What I really meant was the that JCP is more democratic than the North Korean parliament". North Korea is equally outraged, but only manages to fire a rocket at South Korea that lands in the sea. China resumes toy shipments, and the worlds looks forward to a happy 2012. -- 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]. 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