Under the rubric "Be careful what you wish for...",

In the March issue of CPU (Computer Power User) currently on the newsstands, there is an editorial on page 13, entitled simply "Java
Dies", where Alex St. John, CEO and president of WildTangent discusses the sudden passing of Java.

It is a fascinating editorial, written by someone in the know, whose company's products depend heavily on Java.  With the recent
court ruling ordering Microsoft to remove their implementation of Java from Windows XP, he says: "...thousands of Web sites and Web
applications that did (depend on MS's Java implementation,) wouldn't work when millions of consumers upgraded to XP.

Earlier in the editorial, Alex St. John stated that MS made a better version of Java for Windows than Sun and supported it with
better tools.  He further states that MS proceeded to establish Java as an Internet standard by shipping it with every version of
Windows and IE.  He says their real crime was adding value to Java by allowing developers to extend Java in a way that is compatible
with the existing Windows development process.  This was a great affront to Sun, which had hoped that Microsoft would adhere to
their Java standard requirements, including the ones that made adding extensions to Java in Windows unnecessarily slow and awkward.

Sun sued and Microsoft finally yanked their implementation of Java from Windows XP.   Yes, you can download Java from MS or Sun and
install it on your XP system, but most people will not do this.

Alex St. John goes on to explain the impact the elimination of Java from Windows XP has had on his company and its products.  He
explains how they used to support both the Sun and MS Java runtimes but he says "... it quickly became apparent that supporting Sun
was going to be impractical.  The Sun Java implementation was much larger, slower, and less stable than Microsoft's."

Alex further explains that XP without Java could devastate his business, which is delivering high quality games over limited
bandwidth.  Because there was no Java runtime installed in XP, their browser plug-in, which is 1 MB, needed and additional 3MB Java
download.  They scrambled to get the OEMs to load Java on the systems they were selling and even Microsoft reversed their decision
and announced an agreement with Sun to ship their Java implementation in the next XP service pack and support it for a couple of
years.

However, the judge declared that Microsoft would no longer be allowed to ship their version of Java, or allow anyone else to ship it
by end of April, 2003.  The judge also declared that Microsoft must use its updater technology to replace the existing Microsoft
Java implementation (the smaller, faster more developer friendly version) on all Windows OSes with the Sun Java implementation (the
bigger, slower and less stable one.)  Alex states they have 300+ games and 36 million active Web drivers that depend on the MS Java
implementation.  They would all be broken at the end of April.

In the meantime, Microsoft has moved on to what Alex calls "a new, vastly superior Web development language and tools for Windows."
He says the court's decision forces them to move from Java to .NET.  Alex explains a lot more, and this is worth reading.  I believe
he thinks the court decision will effectively kill Java and boost .NET.

Something to think about as you are faced with a decision.

Denys

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