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Did Microsoft break Java?

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  • 23-01-2003 6:19pm
    #1
    scojones
    Closed Accounts Posts: 7,230 ✭✭✭


    Taken from http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/01/21/java/index.html
    Microsoft software engineer who headed the company's Internet Explorer division, wrote a long memo to several company executives, including Bill Gates. Bosworth knew that Gates, then the company's CEO, was about to go on one of his "Think Weeks" -- the monkish retreats during which he pondered Microsoft's long-term business strategies. In preparation for the week, Bosworth wanted to alert Gates to an emerging danger.

    The threat, as Bosworth saw it, was Java, a programming language created by Sun Microsystems that allowed programmers to write code one time and run it on a number of different operating systems -- and securely over the Web -- without customizing it for each configuration of computer hardware and OS. "I think it is important to understand that Java is not just a language," Bosworth began. "If it were just a language, it would not be a threat to us. We would and could easily just build the best implementation of this language and be done. It is, however, much more. It is an alternative to COM" -- which happens to be the programming model on which Windows is based.

    In the course of a thousand words or so, Bosworth explained how easy it was to program in Java. Doing many tasks in the Windows-Com model, using the C++ programming language, required "quite a lot of hard code" that was more cumbersome to write "than the Java equivalent," he wrote. There were some ways that Microsoft could fight Java, Bosworth surmised; one of them was to "quietly offer 'extensions'" to Java that would have the effect of making Java programs work better on Windows, or not at all on other platforms. He cautioned that this should be done "in ways that seduce rather than collide." Above all, Bosworth wrote, Microsoft had to realize the power of Java: "We must acknowledge that Java competes with COM in order to understand what to do about it, not just put our heads in the sand."
    Bosworth's memo alarmed Gates. "This scares the hell out of me," he wrote the next day -- words that turned out to be embarrassing when they were eventually presented in the Justice Department's antitrust trial against Microsoft. (The e-mail thread is available in PDF format.) "It is very unclear to me what our [operating system] will offer to Java client applications code that will make them unique enough to preserve our market position. Understanding this is so important that it deserves top priority."
    And so began Microsoft's effort to stifle Java.

    This is a report that is three pages long so I will not post it all. Basically Microsoft's plans on how it was to battle java were revealed in court - and some people are asking if it was legal.


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