Re: Mindshare and Java

[Rich Graves <llurch@networking.stanford.edu>]

[Tim, didn't you once tell me that long opera were bad?]

I agree that the major innovation, and cypherpunk opportunity, of Java is
in its cross-platform nature, not its vaunted ability to run untrusted
code safely. I'm sorry, I'm just not interested in running untrusted code. 
Give me digitally signed code that I can trust, or for which the author 
can at least be held accountable, and I'll be happy. 

As cool as many of the people on the Java team are, though, I am dubious
that Java is going to live up to the hype. It is still not clear to me
that Microsoft is going to support it seriously in their browser, which by
mid-1997 will be so tightly integrated with the lowest-common-denominator
operating system that there will be no room for Netscape.

NT scares me, too. Even major universities with huge investments in UNIX,
kerberos, and AFS are flirting with NT. I believe they're fucking nuts,
but they're doing it. 

I think it's prudent to hold your nose and accept that Visual Basic is
here to stay. Microsoft isn't going to let Java fulfill its promises.

If you're talking *mind*share, it's all Java. All the best minds are
working on it. But if you're talking *market* share, like what people
spend money on, and get money for, it's VB.

I'm not saying that Microsoft is going to take over the world. We're going
to have a balkanized computing world for some time. But Microsoft can and
will prevent Java from subverting their share of the world.

Has Microsoft even licensed Java, or are they still at the vague December
7th "letter of intent" stage? You know that the early press reports that
Microsoft had licensed Java were wrong, didn't you? You know that the
Internet Explorer 3.0 beta supports VB and not Java, don't you?

[Gee, was that *Tim* complaining about a proponderance of off-topic posts? 
I wholly agree, so I've been *trying* to ignore all the trolls. I invite
people to alt.revisionism and other appropriate forums for the Nazi stuff.
Unfortunately, alt.censorship is a Grubor cesspool, and the
fight-censorship list is subject to content-based moderation. But I
digress...]

-rich
 http://www.c2.org/~rich/